Category Archives: Entertainment

The historical (in)accuracy of Assassin’s Creed Unity

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Video games can help shape our understandings of historical events. Thus, a debate over the portrayal of the French Revolution in the new Assassin’s Creed:

The former leftist French presidential candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, called it “propaganda against the people, the people who are [portrayed as] barbarians, bloodthirsty savages,” while the “cretin” that is Marie-Antoinette and the “treacherous” Louis XVI are portrayed as noble victims. “The denigration of the great Revolution is a dirty job to instill more self-loathing and déclinisme in the French,” he told Le Figaro. The secretary general of the Left Front, Alexis Corbière, said on his blog:

To all those who will buy Assassin’s Creed: Unity, I wish them a good time, but I also tell them that the pleasure of playing does not stop you from thinking. Play, yes, but do not let yourself be manipulated by those who make propaganda.

Ubisoft, the maker of the Assassin’s Creed series of video games, which has been going since 2007 and has sold more than 70 million copies, is in fact French. One of the makers of the game replied that Assassin’s Creed: Unity is a “consumer video game, not a history lesson” but did say that his team hired a historian and specialists on the Terror and other aspects of the Revolution. Le Monde lays out seven errors in the game here (in French).

In fact, the debate over who are the heroes and villains of the Revolution goes back to the 1790s. British counter-revolutionary thought often focused on the suffering of the monarchy in their stories, such as the King’s tearful goodbye to his family before his execution on Jan. 21st, 1793 or Marie-Antoinette’s perhaps apocryphal last words to her executioner after stepping on his foot just before her head was cut off: “Pardon me sir. I did not mean to do it.”

So perhaps the game simply reflects the ongoing debates of which actors in the French Revolution should be cast as heroes or villains? This all intrigued me because one of my classes recently considered how historical narratives are constructed and then played several historical video games to see how each portrays history. Some games clearly try to impart more historical accuracy – and these seem to be ones more intent on educational purposes – while others suffer from the gamification of history. This can lead to two things:

1. The games differ in their levels of ambiguity; after all, there has to be a winner. But, even as this debate illustrates, it is not always easy to depict who benefited or should have benefited from particular events. On one hand, it is easy to fight Nazis – there are a video game go-to for a clear enemy – but other events or periods are much more unclear. One solution is to simply drop in an outside story – as the Assassin’s Creed line does – and make it up from there.

2. This often means there is the potential to change history. This may just be a modern fad – This American Life recently asked some Americans about time travel and there was a subset of people who wanted to change big events:

Jonathan Goldstein

And even though they’ve been mulling this over for so long, many still reach for the most well-trodden sci-fi comic book staple.

Man 4

My first impulse about time travel is the same one that I would guess that everybody has. You know, thinking that I’m going to go back and I’m going to kill Hitler.

Sean Cole

What’s funny is that they know it’s kind of lame. You can hear it in their voices.

Man 4

Or kill Hitler when he’s a baby, or kill his mother or something.

Jonathan Goldstein

They preface it with phrases like–

Woman 1

It’s the thing everyone always says is–

Sean Cole

And then they say it anyway.

Woman 1

If there hadn’t been a Hitler–

Man 5

Put a bullet in Adolf Hitler’s head when he was still a student, I guess…

And of course, no one imagines that they’ll end up with an iron collar around their neck, working in a quarry. Instead, they have a starring role in the historical docu-drama. Like this guy, who’d set the controls for the Revolutionary War.

Man On Street 2

I don’t think I’d be like, a general in the field or anything like that. But I’d probably be more of like an adviser to Washington. Like Alexander Hamilton was, right? And a few other folks. So yeah.

Jonathan Goldstein

I love how you’re already an officer in this.

Man On Street 2

Exactly. Yeah.

Historical games can pose an interesting “what if?” yet also lead to improbable events or outcomes.

I would guess most of these action-oriented games are not concerned much about historical accuracy outside of how it can enhance the backdrop or the gameplay. Yet, given the sales of these games, the amount of time spent playing them, and who purchases them (often younger people), such games could go a long way toward influencing perceptions of the past.

Preserving the Beatles modest post-World War II childhood homes

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The Beatles grew up in modest homes outside of Liverpool but because of the stature of their former residents, the U.K. National Trust has preserved the dwellings:

A recent feature in the Liverpool Echo details how the U.K.’s National Trust restored the dwellings where Beatles songs like “Please Please Me” and “I Saw Her Standing There” were written. The childhood homes of John Lennon and Paul McCartney have been warped back to the ’50s, using “photographs and eyewitness accounts” as a guide to restoring fixtures and sourcing identical furniture.

Both homes are located in Liverpool, and are currently owned by the National Trust, which operates public tours four times a day. Lennon’s house, called Mendips, was purchased by Yoko Ono in 2002, who donated it to the Trust, requesting they “restore the house to what it once was, and tell John’s story.” (Paul’s has been owned by the Trust for 16 years.) Today, Mendips still has the creaky floorboards that Lennon once had to tiptoe around when returning from late night gigs. There’s also a replica of his bike leaning by the side of the house.

Notable details in McCartney’s former home include a replica of his first guitar and a stack of eggs tray in the kitchen, which his father used for noise insulation when the boys rehearsed in the dining room.

From what I have gathered in reading over the years, these homes aren’t terribly different from many homes in Britain after World War II. The Beatles came from working-class to middle-class families who cast normal aspirations for their sons. Of course, the Beatles moved beyond those aspirations though there was an interesting period between the start of their musical careers and before they hit it big when it wasn’t clear whether they were going to be stuck in normal lives. While it is hard to imagine a Paul McCartney or John Lennon living mundane lives in office jobs or manual labor or hustling to get by, this could have happened.

I suspect one question that people would ask when walking through these homes is how such music could have been developed in such settings. Perhaps it even helps drive home the point about the unusual success of the Beatles compared to many others.

Flawed pie chart with too many categories, unhelpful colors

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AllMusic had a recent poll asking readers about their favorite Beatles album. Interesting topic but the pie chart used to display the results didn’t work out so well:

 

http://infogr.am/beatles-poll-results?src=web

Two main complaints:

1. There are a lot of categories to represent here:14 different albums. While it is relatively easy to see some of the larger categories, it gets more difficult to judge the proportions of the smaller categories.

2. There are some categories clearly bigger than others but the color scene seems to have little to do with the actual album title. The palette runs from black to light gray but it does not appear to be in any order. For example, they might have used the same palette but light gray would have been Please Please Me while the darkest color could have been Past Masters. As it currently stands, the reader has to pick out the category and then try to figure out where it is in the key.

Given this comes from an app intended to help create infographics, this one isn’t so great as it suffers from two issues – lots of categories and a limited color design – that I often warn my statistics students about when using pie charts.

Can “everyone win” in the culture wars now fought in a fragmented pop culture landscape?

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One writer suggests the fragmented pop culture of today allows opportunities for culture warriors of all sides to find their niche:

Now we are in the midst of a new culture war, in which fans and creators battle each other and sometimes themselves. It is being waged over whether or not culture is political, and if so, what its politics ought to be and how they might be expressed. That conflict has also diffused beyond the academic, religious and political institutions who were major players in earlier convulsions. Today it is wildly fragmented in a way that suggests vigorous and ongoing debates rather than an easy resolution.

The fierce arguments of today often center on whether culture is changing fast enough, and whether change means chucking out old ideas, storytelling tropes and character types...

Many of the flash points in the new culture wars are the same issues of identity politics that roiled universities in earlier decades. But rather than slugging it out in academic presses through works like Martin Bernal’s “Black Athena,” which situated classical civilization’s roots in Africa, or polemics like Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind,” the battlefields are low culture and the combatants are consumers, mass media critics and creators…

But for those who are fighting for a culture in which all stories have a chance to be told, though, the prospects are decidedly sweeter…

As we consume and discuss everything that is available to us now, we might not settle our big questions about art and politics and which values are best and how best to present them. The wonderful thing about this moment of technological and economic evolution and cultural proliferation is that we do not actually have to. The present culture war is the rare conflict in which almost everyone has a chance to win.

As noted, fragmentation is good if the goal is a lot of options and everyone getting a chance to present their perspectives. Yet, if the goal is one side or the other “winning” or even some measure of moral consensus, fragmentation is not so good.

At the same time, the idea that the culture wars are now playing out in pop culture also suggests that the average consumer is paying attention to these issues. Maybe they are moreso than in the past. However, I would guess there are still a lot of media consumers who aren’t thinking about these flashpoints as they consume. With an average consumption of 11 hours of media a day, layering the culture wars on top of that is a whole new ballgame.

Chicago P.D. promotes untruths about urban police work

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Gregg Easterbrook points out that the TV show Chicago P.D. takes numerous liberties in depicting urban police and crime:

NBC promotes Chicago P.D. by implying it shows the gritty, realistic truth of urban police work, much as the network promoted Hill Street Blues a generation ago. But Chicago P.D. isn’t vaguely realistic. The 15-episode first season depicted half-dozen machine-gun battles on Chicago streets. Gunfire is distressingly common in Chicago, but nothing like what the show presents. Mass murders, explosions and jailbreaks are presented as everyday events in the Windy City. A dozen cops have been gunned down in the series so far; that’s more than the total killed on-duty by gunfire in actual during the current decade. (Look on the left for Chicago; the right is the national figure.) Officers on Chicago P.D. obtain in minutes the sort of information that takes real law enforcement months to compile. A detective barks, “Get me a list of all gang-affiliated males in this neighborhood.” A moment later, she’s holding the info.

The antihero protagonist is said to have been in prison for corruption but released “by order of the police chief.” This really is not how the justice system works. Then a cop-killer also is released “by order of the police chief,” which sets up a plot arc in which the good guys seek vengeance. In the real Chicago — or any big city — a convicted cop-killer would never see sunlight again.

Okay, it’s television. But what’s disturbing about Chicago P.D. is audiences are manipulated to think torture is a regrettable necessity for protecting the public. Three times in the first season, the antihero tortures suspects — a severe beating and threats to cut off an ear and shove a hand down a running garbage disposal. Each time, torture immediately results in information that saves innocent lives. Each time, viewers know, from prior scenes, the antihero caught the right man. That manipulates the viewer into thinking, “He deserves whatever he gets.”…

NBC executives don’t want to live in a country where police have the green light to torture suspects. So why do they extol on primetime the notion that torture by the police saves lives? Don’t say to make the show realistic. Nothing about “Chicago P.D.” is realistic — except the scenery.

One excuse is that this is just TV. At the same time, shows like this perpetuate myths about urban crime and police. While crime is down in cities in recent decades, shows like this suggest worse things are happening: it’s not just gun violence but open use of machine guns, not just some crooked cops but consistently crooked cops in a crooked system, and prisoners are routinely tortured. There may be a little truth in all of these things but consistently showing them leads to incorrect perceptions which then affect people’s actions (voting, whether they visit the city, who they blame for social problems, etc.).

Even Utopia needs followers

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After watching a number of the early episodes and reading several reviews, I think I know one thing the new reality show Utopia is missing: followers. As some have noted, the show seems to feature a number of outgoing and stubborn personalities. These can be the sort of people reality shows attract: go-getters who are there to win. Even though Utopia doesn’t have the typical winning as it has mostly eschewed competitions (except surviving for an entire year and sending out one person a month), it also appeals to strong-willed survivalists who think they have the right skills in creating a new society.

But, to work in the long-term, every larger society needs followers, people willing to support leaders as well as do a lot of the basic work that needs to be done. Without that, you end up with a lot of disagreement about what should be done and little actual work. If they really worked with leaders and followers, the band on Utopia could really accomplish things: imagine 15 adults working to expand the garden or digging trenches for irrigation. This may happen eventually as the group settles in but the lack of followers in hindering them at this point.

This also reminds me of Karl Marx’s ideas about what a socialistic utopia would look like. This is a quote from “The German Ideology“:

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

This gives a lot of freedom to individuals but sometimes society does need tasks done.

A video tutorial on how to build a McMansion in The Sims

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Two players put together a McMansion in The Sims and you can see the process here.

A few thoughts:

1. If I heard correctly on the video, this originally took 3 hours to build.

2. The builders note that this is a modern home yet the headline says it is a McMansion. While it is a large home and clearly has some wealth (located on a canal), the design does not necessarily make it s stereotypically American McMansion.

3. This has over 21,000 views in 2+ days.

4. The designers intended to have a fountain outside the house but alas, it was never constructed. That fountain would have contributed to a McMansion style.

5. Interesting that this features two Aussies. If there is one country in the world that can rival the United States in McMansions, Australia is it.

6. I get the impulse to design things in games like this. While I have never done much with The Sims, I’ve spent a lot of time doing similar things with urban planning in SimCity. Yet, I’m curious to know how much homes like these enhance the gameplay. How much better is it to have a family of Sims living in a custom-designed home like this compared to the average home?

Wherever you go, you just can’t escape those pesky McMansions…

DC punk music takes on gentrification

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One writer explores how punk music in Washington D.C. has long since moved on from Ronald Reagan and is now attacking gentrification:

It’s a total Empire Strikes Back play: Satellite Room is one of the latest bars produced by Eric and Ian Hilton, entrepreneurs who are regarded by many as the face of gentrification along Washington’s hippest corridors. For example: In a recent cover story on dive bars for the Washington City Paper, Paul Vivari, owner of one such dive bar (Showtime), complained that the Hilton brothers named one of their properties, Marvin, after life-long D.C. resident Marvin Gaye. Specifically, Marvin is a Belgian restaurant that refers to the year that Gaye spent in Belgium—a swagger-jacking move if ever there was one. (To be fair, Marvin is also one of the most diverse bars in all of Washington.)…

A pseudonymous punk going by the name Jack on Fire put out a song called “Burn Down the Brixton” just days after the Post‘s story. In this song, “The Brixton” refers to another one of the Hiltons’ properties, a multi-story bar and restaurant in D.C.’s historic U Street corridor that’s packed to the rafters most nights. The song couldn’t be more topical:

Burn down the Brixton!
Send it to its doom!
Then we’ll have a milkshake at the Satellite Room

[ . . . ]

They paved Black Broadway for a breeding ground
A nice patch of grass for some K Street cows

But the snappiest pushback against gentrification—and against development of any kind, really—is by Chain and the Gang. “Devitalize the City” is an anthem celebrating chaos in the face of market-driven homogenization in Washington (and elsewhere)…

While it makes sense from a certain perspective for D.C. musicians to target developers who appear to turn over properties and churn out bars by a formula, artists’ wrath may be better directed at a higher office. Only Congress has the power to lift the Height Act of 1910 that puts a cap on building height in Washington. That law restricts the supply of housing, office buildings, and taverns alike, meaning that when demand is as high as it is today there’s that much less room for dives, group houses, art galleries, and DIY venues—things that help a scene to thrive. To be sure, plenty of developers, homeowners, and local pols are satisfied with the status quo, but only Congress can change it.

Gentrification has raised concern in a number of American cities but not all of the movements against it have prompted songs. Any of these songs draw the attention of activists who use it for their cause?

It might also be worth exploring what exactly gentrification does for the careers of punk music. I suspect punk groups are not exactly welcome in swanky spots for young professionals in gentrifying neighborhoods. But, that suspicion is based on a single notion of gentrification where it is only white and wealthy people who quickly take over a neighborhood. The process is often slower and can include a wider range of people, perhaps leaving space for theaters and bars and other performing spots for punk artists.

The house the Tanner family on Full House could really afford in the Bay Area

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With rumors of a possible Full House remake, Trulia took a look at what the Tanner family could realistically afford:

Like the concept of home itself, the Full House house is largely placeless: Shots of the exterior come from the Lower Pac Heights Victorian at 1709 Broderick, the Painted Ladies of Alamo Square encourage all kinds of assumptions in the credits, and the address the characters use (1882 Girard) is actually wedged up against the 101 in Visitacion Valley. Still, it’s fairly obvious that the Tanner family of today could not so easily swing a Painted Lady, or its stand-in, in this market. Trulia actually ran the numbers and came up with the budget that a morning-show host, a musician, and a rock-paper-scissors champion would need to house the pre-mogul-phase Olsen twins and those other sisters. That number is $1.23M. And you know what? We found them a house!

First, the math:

Trulia used 1709 Broderick as the baseline. They say that the property sold last year for $2.865M. (Which is weird. Per the MLS, the last sale was in 2006, for $1.85M. Property Shark estimates the property’s current value at just over $2.05M—perhaps they were looking at that?) Gah, so much of this is theoretical, anyway: The real 1709 Broderick is only a three-bedroom, and according to these plans, they need at least four.) Anyway, the point is that the Bob Saget hair helmet and its costarring ‘dos need a lower mortgage payment. Here is what Trulia figured, assuming 20 percent down and a 30-year, 4.1 percent fixed-rate mortgage:

Let’s do the math: if Danny (played by Bob Saget) made close to $160,000 a year as the host of the local TV show, Wake Up, San Francisco, Joey made $30,000 doing stand-up gigs around the country, and Uncle Jesse raked in $48,000 as a musician, together, they could only afford a home around $1.23 million or about a $6,000-a-month mortgage.Of the homes around the $1.23M mark on the market right now, this four-bedroom Victorian in the Inner Richmond, just a block and a half from the park, is the only candidate that makes any kind of sense. It just squeezes in under budget at $1.15M, comes with a backyard large enough for a picnic table and the doling of woodwind-scored life lessons, and even has mint-sherbet-shingle synchronicity with this actual Painted Lady. There’s no garage, though, so Uncle Joey would need to live in the storage space.

Two thoughts:

1. This gives some quick insight into the superheated Bay Area housing market. The Tanners are not buying a cheap house with this estimated income yet they are clearly not living in the implied homes from the exterior shots because they could not afford it.

2. This is a common trend among family sitcoms on television: the “normal” family depicted often lives in a home that is realistically way beyond their means. I’ve been looking at some research regarding depictions of homes on TV and this dates back to the nuclear family sitcoms of the 1950s where families tended to live in pretty big houses for their time. Sociologist Juliet Schor argues that this increased level of consumption on television – the middle-class family living in bigger houses and having more stuff, seemingly without having to worry about finances – influenced American consumer patterns as their expectations of “normal” changed.

“The 12 Most Annoying Things People Say on House Hunters”

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While this isn’t a scientific study of the hundreds of episodes, this list rings true from my watching experience. Here are a few of the 12:

3. “We Love Entertaining!”
How many dinner parties are these people throwing? Kid & Play didn’t have as many house parties as those couples. You aren’t hosting the Presidential Ball, so I’m sure your terrible friends are OK hanging out in the living room and the kitchen…

6. The Walk-In Closet Joke
I didn’t realize I was watching comedy hour! You gotta love that same, stupid joke where the lady walks into the closet and she says, “Well, this should be enough room … FOR MY CLOTHES! LOL!” Sometimes the guy will say it and sort of nudge his wife in a way where you can literally see the unhappiness in her eyes…

10. “We’ve Just Outgrown Our Old Place”
There are two of you and you lived in a three-bedroom house. Mathematically, you could not be more wrong. You could remedy this by selling some of the boxes of garbage piling up all over your hoarder-y house, or just admitting you want a bigger place for no other reason than you feel like it. Or just say the old place is haunted…

12. Crown Molding
Please shut up about crown molding. No one sits in their living room and thinks “Wow, look at that crown molding. If that wasn’t here this house would be a toilet.”

There could be several good reasons for these common concerns:

1. Participants are coached to talk bout these topics. Perhaps producers are feeding them these lines. Perhaps these are the lines the producers think people want to hear about.

2. Perhaps participants have seen enough of the show that they are imitating what they have heard. When they don’t quite know how to respond (watch their microexpressions as they react and then what they say), they fall back on these “scripts.”

3. As sad as it might be, maybe this represents what a lot of Americans think when they look at new housing: they often focus on a few details (closets, crown molding, etc.) without talking much about the big picture (do we really need this house?).

All that said, House Hunters certainly follows a certain “formula” for each episode that is fairly predictable. And while viewers may scoff at the comments of the participants, it wouldn’t be the same show if you took the people out and simply showed three homes as a comparison.