Category Archives: Entertainment

A call for better statistics to better distinguish between competitive gamers

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Here is a call for more statistics in gaming, which would help understand the techniques of and differentiation between competitive gamers:

Some people even believe that competitive gaming can get more out of stats than any conventional sport can. After all, what kind of competition is more quantifiable than one that’s run not on a field or on a wooden floor but on a computer? What kind of sport should be able to more defined by stats than eSports?

“The dream is the end of bullshit,” says David Joerg, owner of the StarCraft statistic website GGTracker. “eSports is the one place where everything the player has done is recorded by the computer. It’s possible—and only possible in eSports—where we can have serious competition and know everything that’s going on in the game. It’s the only place where you can have an end to the bullshit that surrounds every other sport. You could have bullshit-free analysis. You’d have better conversations, better players, and better games. There’s a lot of details needed to get there, but the dream is possible.”…

“There are some stats in every video game that are directly visible to the player, like kill/death,” GGTacker’s Joerg said. “Everyone will use it because it’s right in front of their face, and then people will say that stat doesn’t tell the whole story. So then a brave soul will try to invent a stat that’s a better representation of a player’s value, but that leads to a huge uphill battle trying to get people to use it correctly and recognize its importance.”…

You could make the argument that a sport isn’t a sport until it has numbers backing it up. Until someone can point a series of statistics that clearly designate a player’s superiority, there will always be doubters. If that’s true, then it’s true for eSports as much as it was for baseball, football and any other sport when it was young. For gaming, those metrics remain hidden in the computers running StarCraft, League of Legends, Call of Duty and any other game being played in high-stakes tournaments. Slowly, though, we’re starting to discover how competitive gaming truly works. We’re starting to find the numbers that tell the story. That’s exciting.

This is a two part problem:

1. Developing good statistics based on important actions with a game that have predictive ability.

2. Getting the community of gamers to agree that these statistics are relevant and can be helpful to the community.

Both are complex problems in their own right and this will likely take some time. Gaming’s most basic statistic – who won – is relatively easy to determine but the numbers behind that winning and losing are less clear.

Dunphy’s home from Modern Family isn’t exactly a middle-class home

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The home used as the Phil and Claire Dunphy household on Modern Family is up for sale:

[G]et ready for a blast of memories from “Modern Family,” the Golden Globe & Emmy-winning ABC prime-time comedy that was filmed at 10336 Dunleer Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90064.

The price is $2.35 million, but listing agent Mitch Hagerman of Coldwell Banker Previews International said there’s decent income potential given the fact that TV producers have forked over generous fees for the right to film exterior shots of the property. He said it would be up to the new owners to negotiate with ABC Studios…

The home is a traditional, two-story style and has been impeccably remodeled, complete with crown molding, wood floors and upgraded appliances. It sits on a prime street in the coveted Cheviot Hills neighborhood. Hagerman says the home should sell pretty easily on its own merits.

“It’s a charming, gorgeous, cozy, family-oriented and classic-style home in a fantastic neighborhood where there’s very little inventory,” he said.

The home offers 4 bedrooms with en suite bathrooms, plus a powder room. The home last sold for $1.97 million in 2006.

A nice and expensive home. This is interesting because the Dunphy family is portrayed as being fairly middle-class. Phil is a realtor who is not the most successful or smart (these are running points throughout the shows). Claire recently returned to work, working for her father’s closet business, after not working. Where do they get all of their money? How do they afford such a nice house?

Sociologist Juliet Schor argued in The Overspent American that one problem of post-World War II television is that it showed an increasingly lavish middle-class lifestyle. The evolving image of the middle-class on television showed families with more money and possessions and not much discussion about how they could afford it all. The Dunphys are supposed to look like normal Americans yet their lifestyle is pretty wealthy with little concern about money and pretty nice possessions. Schor suggests portrayals like this pushed more Americans to consume more.

In other words, the show plays off the idea the extended family depicted is a “typical” American family yet its class status is far from what many American families experience.

Court says director of “The Queen of Versailles” did not defame film’s subject

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The director of an interesting film about the largest single-family home in the United States was cleared of defamation charges in court:

Lauren Greenfield received a best director nod at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival for her documentary, “The Queen of Versailles.” Now, two years later, she has another victory to her credit, which may ultimately prove more important to her career.

An arbitrator at the Independent Film and Television Alliance ruled that her movie about David and Jackie Siegel was not defamatory. This seems to end Siegel’s effort to punish Greenfield for her film, which centered in large measure on the family’s profligate ways — building a 90,000 square-foot mansion (to replace the 26,000 square-foot home they lived in); spending $1 million a year on clothing, and having a household staff of 19…

Siegel charged the film defamed him and his company. His claims were dismissed by a federal court judge, which is how the case ended up in arbitration.

“Having viewed the supposedly egregious portions of the Motion Picture numerous times, [the Arbitrator] simply does not find that any of the content of the Motion Picture was false,” the arbitrator, Roy Rifkin, ruled.

An unflattering but true story can still be told. But, if the story was not going to be positive, why participate in the first place or go through the whole process after things had turned sour? As I note in my quick review of the film, the story is less about the big house and more about what happens when someone loses lots of money and disconnects from his family. Also see a September 2013 update on the fate of the home.

Microsoft hoping to sell lots of political ads on XBox Live, video games

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Ads in video games are not new but Microsoft is looking to use more recent technology and information to sell political ads in its online spaces:

Microsoft is trying to persuade politicians to take out targeted ads on Xbox Live, Skype, MSN and other company platforms as midterm elections begin heating up around the country. To plug the idea, Microsoft officials handed out promotional materials Thursday at CPAC, the annual conference for conservatives.

It’s the latest move by tech companies to seize a piece of the lucrative political ad market. The ads, which would appear on the Xbox Live dashboard and other Microsoft products, combine Microsoft user IDs and other public data to build a profile of Xbox users. Campaigns can then blast ads to selected demographic categories, or to specific congressional districts. And if the campaign brings its own list of voter e-mail addresses, Microsoft can match the additional data with individual customer accounts for even more accurate voter targeting.

The image of white male teens as the stereotypical average gamer is something of a myth; Microsoft says that of its 25 million Xbox Live subscribers in the United States, 38 percent are women. Forty percent are married, and more than half have children. Those numbers are important, because they represent key demographics that are among the most contested in political races. Microsoft is particularly aggressive in selling its ability to reach women, Latinos and millennials; across the company’s other platforms, such as MSN, Microsoft has developed consumer categories like “Ciudad Strivers” and “Nuevo Horizons” that attempt to describe a set of characteristics including age, type of residence and income level. At a time when virtually all politicians are resorting to microtargeting, this technology could help Microsoft become a major player in the advertising space…

Microsoft has made successful pitches to political campaigns before. In 2012, President Obama agreed to advertise on Xbox Live for his reelection campaign. The effort sparked some complaints among Xbox users who disliked the ad appearing on their dashboards. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, meanwhile, opted not to participate. Obama has also advertised within games themselves. With the release last year of the Xbox One, it’s safe to expect Xbox Live to become another important platform in the political ad wars.

It will be interesting to see how users respond and then how effective such ads are. This shouldn’t be much of a surprise to users: we shouldn’t be surprised if we volunteer data online and then it is used for targeted ads. Plus, given the time people spend playing video games (particularly for demographics that might not be accessing more traditional media as much), this seems like a relatively untapped market compared to television. Yet, it is harder to argue this has many benefits for users. While some might argue targeted ads for consumer goods show people what they might want, what average XBox Live user wants to be presented with political content while trying to play a game?

Earbuds have led us to a decade of treble over bass

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Listening to music through earbuds tends to favor treble over bass and this has social consequences:

“At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, with the possibilities for high-fidelity recording at a democratized high and ‘bass culture’ more globally present than ever, we face the irony that people are listening to music, with increasing frequency if not ubiquity, primarily through small plastic speakers—most often via cellphones but also, commonly, laptop computers and leaky earbuds. This return to ‘treble culture,’ recalling the days of transistor radios or even gramophones and scratchy 78s, rep- resents a techno-historical outcome of varying significance for different practitioners and observers, the everyday inevitability of ‘tinny’ transmissions appearing to affirm a preference for convenience, portability, and publicity, even as a variety of critical listeners express anxiety about what might be lost along with frequencies that go unheard (and, in the case of bass, unfelt). From cognitive and psychological studies seeking to determine listeners’ abilities to distinguish between different MP3 bitrates to audiophiles and ‘bass boosters’ of all sorts lamenting not only missing frequencies but also the ontological implications thereof to commuters complaining about noisy broadcasts on public transport, there has already been a great deal of ink spilled over today’s trebly soundscapes.”

And the concluding lines from the full chapter:

As mobile devices, especially phones, make sound reproduction—however trebly—more commonplace and perhaps more social than ever before (hotly contested as that sociality or sociability may be), we can only wonder about, as we try to take stock of, the effects on listening as a private and a (counter?) public activity, not to mention the implications thereof (Warner 2002).
Imagining unheard bass calls attention to the active possibilities in treble culture. And indeed, as perhaps my own narrative offers, a lot of the dyads through which the public debate plays out—active versus passive, progressive versus regressive, public versus private, sociable versus individualistic—might be easily enough flipped depending on one’s perspective. This reconcilability suggests that treble culture, especially in its contemporary form, offers what writer and artist Jace Clayton (aka DJ /Rupture) calls a “strategy for intimacy with the digital” (2009). In the ongoing dance between people and technology, treble culture opens a space where imaginary bass can move us as much as tinny blasts of noise. As participants in today’s treble culture attest, the MP3 may play its listener, but people imagine a lot more than missing bits when they listen. Ironically, the techno-historical convergence that Gilroy mourns, in which “community and solidarity, momentarily constituted in the very process, in the act of interpretation itself ” (2003:388)—a lament which issues also from the anxious discourse around today’s treble culture—may yet find some resuscitation thanks to trebly audio technologies. For what do such acts of interpretation require if not listening together? And isn’t listening, perhaps more now and more collectively and publicly than ever, what treble culture is all about?

This seems to be an interesting counterargument to those who argue earbuds ruin public spaces because everyone is off in their own worlds. This may be temporarily true as one is listening – and it seems to be even more prevalent on college campuses, though I remember doing this with my own Walkman or Discman during college – but Marshall is talking about broader music culture and the sociability it fosters. People could be brought together by their trebly experiences as basically everyone with a smartphone can carry thousands of songs, if not access millions of songs through streaming services, from everywhere.

Another thought: the Beats headphones have been quite popular even with higher price tags. Is this due to an ongoing battle between treble and bass culture?

Lorde observes NBA game as an objective observer

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Music star Lorde attended a recent Chicago Bulls game and sent these tweets while at the game:

i am at a bulls game this is so intense how does everyone in this room not have a stress ulcer

— Lorde (@lordemusic) March 18, 2014

i am such an outsider to the world of sport but i feel very proud of all playing

— Lorde (@lordemusic) March 18, 2014

the cheerleaders are doing synchronized movements to small pieces of drum-based instrumental music

— Lorde (@lordemusic) March 18, 2014

in the break they rolled out a red carpet on the court and a man did some tricks with his dog

— Lorde (@lordemusic) March 18, 2014

This presents an intriguing opportunity to compare how the average American sports fan would view things opposed to an outsider. For sports fans, it is easy to think of all they see as “natural:” the players just do what they do, the fans respond in certain ways, and the stadium experience is fairly similar across the United States. However, it is easy to forget that all of this “natural” behavior or knowledge is all learned. The whole American sports/entertainment package has a fairly set course from sports talk radio to how it is presented on television to how it is experienced live.

In her first experience at a NBA game, Lorde was simply describing what she saw. None of it is wrong and she is making “common sense” observations that might make little sense to non-fans. Why would there be a man with a dog doing tricks during the break? Why are stadium experiences in the US so intense (loud, constant videos)? Why do cheerleaders do what they do? The average sports fan may not even have good answers to these questions; those things happen because that is the way it has always happened. Of course, that is not true: sports experiences can differ widely based on contexts and history.

In this way, an outsider can bring needed perspective to a social norm many of us just take for granted. Is Lorde’s view of the NBA game more objective than those who have lots of basketball knowledge and experience?

Portraying a broken-down Chicago in Divergent

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The new movie Divergent takes place in a dystopian Chicago:

And instead of a vibrant, healthy metropolis of canals and glass towers downtown, the Lake Shore Drive bridge at the Chicago River has collapsed; a few skyscrapers have fallen into jumbles of stones; a few are heavily damaged, the outcome of some unnamed catastrophe; and many more stand dormant and dark. There don’t seem to be any cars, and there don’t seem to be any people. A little water remains in the main branch of the river but not that much. And everywhere, vegetation runs riot…

Throughout the spring and summer last year, while the movie crew of “Divergent” shot around Chicago, production designer Andy Nicholson, who had recently finished work on the technologically innovative “Gravity,” often found himself driving through potholes. Every day he drove to the set, he said, and every day he would notice “a lot of Chicago roads needed resurfacing or seemed about to be resurfaced or were in the middle of resurfacing. You saw a lot of neglect in Chicago.” And when the crew ventured into old steel yards on the South Side, Nicholson noticed overgrowth not unlike what he pictured for Michigan Avenue in the film…

Said Haller: “They wanted to know what Chicago would look like 20 years in the future so they could then show its decline from there out. I told them: More tall buildings. And we don’t envision any new districts, but probably more expansion west. And we’re sort of slaves to transportation systems, so everything would continue to converge on the Loop.” He also told them about the city’s flood-fighting Deep Tunnel Project (in the film, one of the factions is headquartered in a network of massive underground tunnels). “I didn’t mean to sound optimistic,” Haller said, “but, barring ecological collapse, our dystopian possibilities are mitigated.”…

Despite seemingly intractable problems that would suggest it is a perfect 21st-century dystopian setting — perpetually heavy-handed government, gun violence, profound inequality — Chicago is, in fact, such a prosperous place that it’s likely new installments of “Divergent” will not film here. (The sequel, “Insurgent,” will shoot in Atlanta, and it is unclear what Chicago’s role will be.) The city is too expensive. Said Rich Moskal, director of the Chicago Film Office: “Filmmakers understand it’s a thriving place, which makes it difficult to push everything aside to film. Chicago can read, in places, as a city in decline. Yet, sitting next door, you’re also looking at some of the highest-priced real estate in the country.”

Predicting what cities of the future will look like is difficult for many films, whether projecting American cities will look more like Chinese cities in Her or creating all new cities in The Hunger Games. It sounds like the plan for Divergent was to try to “naturally” project what a decaying Chicago might look like in a few decades. It is interesting how they looked for inspiration to some of the older industrial area of Chicago, places that once housed more businesses and people but were left behind by a shift away from manufacturing. All major American cities likely have some areas that are like this, not all that far away from the glittering downtowns where business and political leaders try to funnel tourists and businesses. In fact, this is one of the more fascinating features of modern cities (since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution): there are parts humming with culture, business activity, and sparkling features of modern life and then there are places that literally seem of a different decade or century.

At the same time, the presence of potholes in the midst of one of the worst winters on record doesn’t necessarily foretell a dystopia in the near future…

Interpreting the architecture of “12 Years a Slave”

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A movie critic looks at what director Steve McQueen says in the architecture of the film 12 Years a Slave:

Beginning with an early shot that pans up from Northup’s face and through dozens of layers of bricks before ending with a shot of the Washington skyline — he is in for it, that scene says — the movie takes up architectural symbols in a sustained and strategic way.

This is most obviously true in the way the porches of the slave owners’ houses tower over Northup like looming Parthenons of white privilege. It is most persuasively true of the pair of structures that Northup helps to build and that become a visual way to track his slow path back to freedom.

First comes a slave shack that he works to frame and that stands in the background, roofless, as he hangs from a tree after barely surviving a lynching attempt. Next is what turns out to be a gazebo on the grounds of a second plantation. The gazebo is roofless as well for scene after scene, until Northup meets and tells his story to a sympathetic abolitionist carpenter played by Brad Pitt.

Once they make a pact that will lead to Northup’s freedom, McQueen gives us a shot of the completed gazebo, with Northup standing under it. He’s recovered at least a suggestion of his dignity; he won’t have to work, write letters, clean himself or take abuse from his various white tormentors in the open air any longer.

Architecture is society — in this film as in all of McQueen’s work — and Northup is about to be restored to it. This is also where convention comes in: Architecture gives us one of the first signs that the movie is going to have an old-fashioned happy ending.

There is more here about how McQueen has used architecture in his other films.

This review makes it sound like the architecture is symbolic. In this film, it indicates Northup’s fate. But, what about how the characters interact with the architecture and space? What about how social space affects their interactions?

The past importance of movie theaters to suburban downtowns and the difficulty of reviving them today

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The downtown movie theater was once an important part of suburbs but a number of these theaters have been difficult to revive in recent years:

Theater stories abound in the suburbs. The lavishly restored Paramount Theater in Aurora offers Broadway plays and big-name musical acts. The Arcada Theatre in St. Charles is another success story. Others — including the Wheaton Grand, Des Plaines Theater and Clearwater Theater in West Dundee — face uncertain futures after opening and closing multiple times in recent years…

Main Street theaters became popular in the late 1920s, when film was just emerging, Fosbrink said. Their construction boomed through the late 1930s and 1940s, particularly as suburbs took hold.

“Planning to have a theater in your town, or an opera house or something (for entertainment) was just as important as planning a city hall or fire station,” he said…

“People at this point in time are paying a lot more attention to how a theater can be a catalyst for economic development in a downtown business district,” Fosbrink said. “Theaters really can drive economic development, and we see a lot of that happening all over the country.”

Once a status symbol and source of local entertainment, these theaters are now possible ways to attract more people to a suburban downtown and hope they spend more money while they are there. Even though they aren’t really needed now (even the multiplexes have had a difficult time in recent years), they might anchor new entertainment districts where suburbanites don’t go to the city for culture but instead stay nearby.

It would be interesting to think about how many of these downtown theaters the Chicago suburbs could support. Particularly if they hope to all thrive, how much money is there to spread around?

Does Chicago gain anything by Jimmy Fallon taking a polar plunge in Lake Michigan?

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New Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon was in Chicago this past weekend participating in a polar plunge. Does Chicago gain anything by this?

Fallon detailed his experience at Chicago’s Polar Plunge during Monday night’s show, a day after he dipped into icy Lake Michigan.

“I’m never doing that again,” Fallon said.

Fallon said Chicago “didn’t let me fool around” when it came to taking up Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s challenge to take the plunge, which benefits Special Olympics Chicago. The event drew a record number of people.

“I go in, and I hear you’re only supposed to go up to your knees,” he said, recalling running into the lake. “I just plunged back, I went under and a couple bubbles came out and I froze. I just stand up and I took my hat off and my hair turned to icicles, and I heard bagpipes. This is how I went. I thought this was it, I thought it was the end.”

Fallon also shared a gift he received from Emanuel, which declares March 2014 “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon Month” in Chicago.

The biggest winner here appears to be the Special Olympics since people donate to participate. Plus, Rahm Emanuel participated because kids read over 2 million books for a Chicago Public Library summer program – reading is good.

But, wasn’t this primarily a publicity stunt for Emanuel as well as Fallon? Emanuel wins by being an active mayor. As Fallon notes in his retelling and shows in a picture, Rahm looks pretty good coming out of the water. Events like this burnish his image as a mayor who gets things done (past Chicago mayors have made similar claims). He helps kids read and cares about others. It doesn’t hurt that a new CNN show “Chicagoland” features him as mayor. Fallon is a new host, replacing Jay Leno. While he takes time out of his schedule to come to Chicago, it is good publicity as he is involved with a charitable cause and is getting out of the New York/Los Angeles bubble that all late night TV shows live in. Maybe the clincher here is Emanuel giving Fallon a resolution saying March is “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon Month in Chicago.” Does this mean much of anything?

I’m not sure this all contributes much to Chicago. It suggests some people are willing to donate to Special Olympics – they had over 3,200 participants this year, no doubt boosted by Emanuel and Fallon’s presence. Chicago is a charitable city or a star-struck city? The polar plunge highlights the weather in Chicago, particularly in a season nearing record ice cover on Lake Michigan. On the whole, Chicagoans like to put on an exterior of tough people who can survive the weather, particularly when interacting with people from other places, but there is plenty of grumbling. But, is a polar plunge likely to bring in new tourists or help companies decide to move to Chicago?

(I realize this might be a grumpy take on a lighthearted event with some human interest appeal. However, this event got a lot of attention beforehand and afterwards and I wanted to think about how Chicago makes out in the whole situation.)