firehose

Since the Great East Japan Earthquake in April 2011, Toshifumi Nakabayashi — president of the International Game Developers Association Japan chapter and CEO of tech consultation company Cyberz, Inc. — and a dedicated group of people have striven to bring about healing in the region through video game development.

The theme of the annual Fukushima Game Jam — a spin-off of the popular Global Game Jam now in its third year — is "revival from disaster." In a panel at GDC today, Nakabayashi spoke about how the game industry is helping those and the area affected by the 2011 earthquake and subsequent tsunami. Clean up work from the damaged Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant is still ongoing, and radioactive contamination has damaged many major agricultural and fishing points in the area.

In the Fukushima Game Jam, participants are divided into teams, each with one professional game developer from Tokyo, and have 30 hours to create a game based on the jam's theme. A wide majority of the participants have been students at vocational schools or in college. All participants visit the area affected by the earthquake and tsunami prior to the jam. The first jam was held in 2011 five months after the earthquake and included 120 participants. The following year 170 people joined the jam, including participants in Taiwan, and the most recent jam in 2013 included 531 people from four different nations.

Anyone can check out the games made during the event on the Fukushima Game Jam official website. Nakabayashi said the event stands out among others focused on bringing awareness and assistance to the Fukushima restoration because it is aimed at promoting a new industry. The game jam also urges participants and observers to think about the present condition of the affected region and foster emotions other than fear and sadness.

"There are other ways to help out than doing a game jam, such as physical labor, grabbing a shovel and cleaning up the mess," he said through a translator. "But we're game developers and we're not very strong. However, if it is making games, we're confident we can do this for days, weeks, even years."

The game jam also has a secondary goal: to educate children and students about the game development process and show them how to use tools that will make it a long-term profession. During the jam, young children and local community members stopped by the event to play the games being made in the jam and listen to talks about game development.

"We in the IT industry aren't really affected by the radiation," Nakabayaki said. "But if there is no industry in the local area, we can't ask or call out for help, so we need to create opportunities for that area."

Through educating local youth about game development, IGDA Japan hopes to promote the formation of a new "cluster" of game development companies in the northeast area of Japan around Fukushima. This, Nakabayashi believes, will help with the restoration of the area.

"I realize this won't happen overnight, but it's a long-term goal we're working towards," he said. "While we can only take baby steps at the moment, but we can continue to put these games forward. Through the Fukushima Game Jam, we have been able to gain the assistance of local government chapters and promote restoration efforts in the area.

"There was a slowdown occurring at many game companies after the disaster, even if they weren't directly affected," he added, noting delays and cancellations seemed to become more common in the wake of the national disaster. He explained that after sitting down with many game companies about doing a jam to bolster the restoration effort, many of them came on board.

The IGDA's Tohoku chapter was of the IGDA's Japan branch founded in Fukushima in November 2012. There are no game companies in the area, so there is no game community. A vocational school took the lead in forming the chapter, which has since been the organizer of the Fukushima game jam. The chapter also holds a one-day game jam every month.

"I just have one question for people who think that women don't want to work in games: have you asked them?"

A Game Developers Conference 2014 panel tackling the myths surrounding women in the gaming industry, lead by Storm8 senior game designer Elizabeth Sampat, offered insight on why these beliefs are false and how to work through them.

Sampat kicked off "Women Don't Want to Work in Games (And Other Myths)" by sharing the results of an informal poll of women in the industry, taken through social media, mailing lists and word of mouth. According to her findings, 45 percent said they've always wanted to work in games.

"That's almost half," Sampat said. "Or, to put it another way, that's less than half ... Every time you perpetuate the myth that the only way to make it in games is to have always wanted to work in games, you're reducing the potential talent pool you're recruiting from by 55 percent."

Sampat, who covered myths such as there are no women to hire, or female candidates not fitting company culture, suggested that companies use recruiters to draw in new candidates. Recruiters should stop looking for a dedication to gaming, she said, and find candidates with curiosity and current interest. Talking to women about the industry and encouraging their interest is another way to pull in fresh voices.

"The game industry is fundamentally tied to games culture ..."

Company culture plays an important role in hiring, but not in the way many think. According to those polled in Sampat's survey, cultures that are flexible, provide clear communication and a collaboration are among the top choices. Negative cultures tend to revolve around alcohol or feature "brogrammer" speak. Sampat argues that culture fit isn't "bullshit," but that it's often applied in harmful ways.

"If someone isn't a culture fit because they schedule meetings at 7 p.m. on a Friday," Sampat said, "and come from a company where design is always at war with marketing, than yeah, don't hire them. Their work habits will negatively impact the work habits of the people who already are in your company. But if somebody didn't laugh at your stupid Magic the Gathering joke or didn't seem excited enough when you mentioned the company fantasy football league, get over it."

"... If you can't find any women who can fit into your company culture, have you considered that your company culture might, you know, suck?"

"... and we can't fault its victims for their own Stockholm syndrome."

Confronting the idea that women can be "one of the good ones" in an alleged sea of temperamental or inadequate peers, Sampat called this idea a "learned, cultured response to systemic oppression."

"When you hear a woman say 'I'm not like them,' whose words are they repeating," Sampat said. "Whose bullshit have they internalized as a survival tactic? The game industry is fundamentally tied to games culture, and we can't fault its victims for their own Stockholm syndrome."

If the games industry hopes to honestly and earnestly embrace diversity, she continued, there are only two options.

"We can uplift that stale narrative of the model minority, the badass loner of a woman who learns to be the cool girl in the boys' club," Sampat said.

" ... Or, there's always the second choice: we can do the other thing, the thing that's harder. The thing that doesn't involve getting a few token rich white women to the top by making them climb over the broken bodies of our sisters. We can burn shit down. We can stop being polite and looking for ways to lay equal blame at the feet of the establishment and those on the outside, as if identifying as a woman was a choice that led to their own self oppression.

"If there isn't room for you in the games industry, then fuck the games industry."

Sampat argues that while programs that get young girls into science and technology are important, these only address a small part of the problem. Instead, the industry should be investing in more women now. The only way to fix the system, she said, is to acknowledge that in its current state, it's broken; by participating, everyone is complicit.

"I'm going to say this as clearly and earnestly as I can," Sampat said. "If there isn't room for you in the games industry, then fuck the games industry. I don't want to be here if you can't be here. And this is something that we need to tell each other constantly ... We need to remind each other that we're not impostors. We belong here. And every day, every single chance that we get, we have to make space for each other."

Back in November Marvel Studios announced a deal to make five TV shows for Netflix; four solo series based on the Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist and Luke Cage characters, and a Defenders series that brings them all together.

Filming on the first of these, Daredevil, begins in July in New York City. No casting announcements have been made, but they’re sure to come soon, and some fans see this as an opportunity to make a change to one character. They’ve created a petition asking that an Asian American actor be cast as Iron Fist.

Iron Fist was created by Roy Thomas and Gil Kane in the pages of Marvel Premiere #15 in 1974. He was one of a number of comic characters inspired by the early ’70s passion for martial arts movies like Enter the Dragon and Game of Death, along with fellow Marvel character Shang-Chi (created by Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin in 1973), and DC’s Richard Dragon and Bronze Tiger (created by Dennis O’Neil and Jim Berry, and by O’Neil, Berry and Leo Duranona, in 1974).

Iron Fist is Danny Rand, an entrepreneur’s son who was orphaned during his father’s expedition to the lost mystical city of K’un Lun. Trained by the monks of K’un Lun and given the power of the Iron Fist, Danny Rand returned home to avenge his father and become a superhero.

Like so many other Marvel heroes, Danny Rand appears in the comics as a dinstinctly Anglo-Saxon-looking blond, white male. Earlier this month Keith Chow of the website The Nerds of Color wrote an article calling on Marvel Studios to cast an Asian American actor as Rand in the Netflix series. The column inspired 18 Million Rising, an advocacy group for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, to create a petition to the same effect.

Chow is the co-editor of two Asian American superhero anthologies, Secret Identities and Shattered, and he believes there aren’t enough opportunities to see Asian Americans in heroic roles. He also thinks it would help solve some of the problematic aspects of the character without changing anything too fundamental.

“In my original post, I lay out how an Asian American Danny Rand can still be all the things from the comic: the son of a wealthy businessman on an expedition in China, student of Lei Kung, lover of Misty Knight, friend to Luke Cage,” Chow told ComicsAlliance. “Danny being white is not essential to any of this.

“In fact, his whiteness is the most problematic thing about the character. The parts of the classic Iron Fist story I have the most problems with — its Orientalism and cultural appropriation — can be alleviated if an Asian American actor is Danny.”

Chow acknowledges that casting Rand with a non-white actor would likely upset the same fans who objected to the casting of Michael B. Jordan as the Human Torch in the next Fantastic Four movie or the casting of Idris Elba as Heimdall in the Thor movies. Yet he notes that “studios cross-racially cast characters of color as white all the time,” citing the examples of The Last Airbender, The Lone Ranger, 21, and the recently announced casting of Rooney Mara as Native American character Tiger Lily in Joe Wright’s in-development Peter Pan movie. “I don’t know why fans lose their minds whenever a traditionally white character is portrayed by a non-white actor.”

The Netflix model — a subscription service for streaming media — has allowed the broadcaster to shake off the idea that all media needs to appeal to the broadest possible advertising demographic, as evidenced by the success of the Netflix show Orange Is the New Black, which boasts a racially diverse and largely female cast. Netflix will already put one non-white superhero on the screen with Luke Cage; there doesn’t seem to be any business reason why it couldn’t give audiences a second non-white hero in Danny Rand.

Chow specifically wants Marvel to cast an Asian American actor in the role. “I think folks forget that being Asian and being Asian American are two different things,” he said. “Danny can still be a fish out of water in K’un Lun, especially if he’s Asian American. It’s why the ‘but you already have Shang Chi’ excuse that doesn’t fly with me. I don’t want a foreign-born actor to play Danny Rand… I want an Asian American.”

Casting an Asian American actor fixes the perception that Iron Fist is a “white savior,” a white person who steps in to a non-white world to become its champion. “The white guy who goes to Asia and is better than the Asians is also a pretty tired cliché,” said Chow. “Never mind Danny Rand, you have Snake Eyes, Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, Daniel-san [in The Karate Kid], Wolverine, every Steven Segal and Jean-Claude Van Damme movie ever, hell, even Batman for chrissakes!”

But is there a danger that casting an Asian American actor would play into the stereotype that all Asian heroes are martial artists?

“I don’t think so. Look, the problem with the Asian martial artist stereotype is not the art itself. The problem has always been how Asian martial artists have been portrayed in Western media. As someone who has practiced martial arts and admires and respects it, I don’t run away from that aspect of my heritage.

“As I said earlier, Danny Rand is a fighter, a lover, a hero, a friend, a son, etc. He is a multifaceted, three-dimensional person — who’s also a superhero with superpowers! Why can’t an Asian American actor get the chance to play all of that? But silent ninjas who are canon fodder and get no speaking lines? Yeah, that’s a problem. I’ll take a three-dimensional martial artist over a one-dimensional anything any time.”

As for who might play Danny Rand, Chow’s suggestion is actor and dancer Harry Shum Jr., best known for his appearances on the TV show Glee. “Someone on twitter suggested Cole Horibe who’s currently portraying Bruce Lee on Broadway,” said Chow. You can see Shum in action in the short film Three Minutes alongside fellow dancer Stephen Boss — “There’s your Heroes for Hire, right there,” noted Chow — and you can watch Horibe in his audition for So You Think You Can Dance.

Whether Marvel takes notice of the petition or not, Chow hopes that this can helps start a conversation. “There is a real bias out there that prevents people of color from getting good roles. If nothing else, I wanted people to really investigate how these comic adaptations are opportunities to reflect the real world. Superheroes don’t have to be the sole domain of white men.”

If you want to support the campaign to have an Asian American actor cast in Marvel and Netflix’s Iron Fist series, sign the 18 Million Rising petition here. You can read more about the petition at The Nerds of Color.

The US government is ready to hack bureaucracy.

At least, that's the stated mission statement of 18F, a fast-moving digital services agency that just launched within the Government Services Administration (located at 18th and F street in the Northwest quarter of Washington, DC). 18F promises to build products for government agencies using lean startup principles, modern programming languages, and open source code, a significant departure from the way most government websites get built.

"We favor experimentation, customer feedback and analytics, and iterative design over a sequential 'waterfall' model," says the office's website, which launched earlier this week. "If startups and companies like General Electric can do it, why not the U.S. government?"

Yesterday, 18F took 29 minutes to push new code onto the GSA's mobile website, the company bragged in a blog post. In the traditional model of government IT, even such a small change could have taken weeks or months to go through the clunky federal procurement process.

The launch of the agency was spurred by the embarrassing launch of Healthcare.gov, the high-profile health insurance marketplace that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build but was so broken that only six people were able to use it on the first day. The website was a major setback for President Barack Obama's administration, but it started a movement to reform the way the government builds technology for its citizens.

18F doesn't yet seem empowered to prevent another Healthcare.gov-type fiasco

The founding of 18F parallels the response in the UK after a failed attempt to upgrade its national healthcare website cost taxpayers more than £9.8 billion. That fiasco prompted the government to institute a Government Digital Service, a 300-person team that tackles federal tech projects. The government estimates the GDS saves taxpayers $20 million a year.

With just 15 employees to start, 18F is much smaller than its UK counterpart. It's also still unclear what types of projects it will be working on, and it doesn't yet seem empowered to prevent another Healthcare.gov-type fiasco.

Clay Johnson, a former Presidential Innovation Fellow who has taken up the cause of reforming federal IT procurement, says he's encouraged but has some concerns. The office needs to log enough "wins" before Obama's term ends to justify its continued existence, for one. It's also unclear whether 18F plans to help privately-owned startups bid on government contracts. "Without appropriate checks in place, what's to prevent this from becoming a large, monolithic contractor inside of government that doesn't have to compete for contracts?" Johnson says.

Imagine someone told you there were going to be more Watchmen comics without Alan Moore or Dave Gibbons. Now you have some idea of what The Boondocks fans felt on Friday when news broke that the long awaited fourth season of the award-winning animated series would finally debut on April 21, but without its revered creator, cartoonist Aaron McGruder.

A ruthless satire of American culture, media and politics, The Boondocks is the story of Huey, a 10-year-old black revolutionary — “Jesus was black, Ronald Reagan was the Devil, and the government is lying about 9/11″ — his bratty little brother Riley, obsessed with vapid pop culture trends and a cold blooded master of disses —  ”Game recognize game and you lookin’ kinda unfamiliar right now” — and their Granddad, a deeply eccentric, old-fashioned and not particularly gentle man tasked by Huey and Riley’s late parents with raising them out of trouble’s way — “How many times have I told you you better not even dream of telling white folk the truth? You better learn how to lie like me. I’m gonna find me a white man and lie to him right now.”

McGruder created The Boondocks in 1996 as a newspaper comic strip while a student at the University of Maryland. The provocative and hilarious comic blew up in syndication, and McGruder continued drawing it until 2006, when he devoted himself to the animated series full time.

The Boondocks TV show debuted in 2005 and became one of Adult Swim’s most popular original series, and certainly its most acclaimed. McGruder’s show won a Peabody award for “Return of the King,” in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. awakens from a coma to confront all manner of subjects, from contemporary African American culture to America’s war on terror. The third and most recent season took on topics including the work of Tyler Perry, the inauguration of Barack Obama, country music, the criminal justice system and medical marijuana.

An Adult Swim press release announcing the fourth (and final) season’s start date of April 21 came with the terse statement, “This season was produced without the involvement of Aaron McGruder, when a mutually agreeable production schedule could not be determined.” Emails to Sony Pictures Entertainment, the production company behind The Boondocks, were not returned.

The news comes just days after McGruder stated that the Boondocks’ Facebook profile had been “hijacked” following the posting of a teaser image for season four. In a status update on the Facebook page of Black Jesus, a new series McGruder is developing for Adult Swim, he wrote, “Just found out someone has hijacked The Boondocks Facebook page. This was done without my permission and I have absolutely no control over the content being posted as of Friday, March 14.”

It now seems evident that The Boondocks‘ Facebook page wasn’t so much “hijacked” as it was used by its owners — Adult Swim or Sony, presumably — for its intended purpose; to promote The Boondocks.

While McGruder’s reaction to the Facebook teaser was the first public indication that anything was amiss with The Boondocks, it is extremely doubtful that it was the first time the writer and cartoonist realized the new season was moving forward without him. The nature of television animation is such that The Boondocks season four would have been in production for several months at least, and McGruder’s status as creator of the show (and the comic strip upon which it based) would, we’re reliably informed, entitle him to some kind of communication to the effect of, “Hey, we are making season four without you” before March 14. McGruder has yet to comment further.

Given the uncommonly long four-year gap between seasons, it’s easy to believe there was indeed a conflict over production schedules, as the Adult Swim press release states. But McGruder’s remarks and seeming bewilderment raise questions about the exact nature and timing of his break with the show he created and produced to immense acclaim.

Last year, The Fullbright Company released Gone Home, earning a rush of positive reviews and awards.

So what's life been like since then? The Fullbright Company's co-founder Steve Gaynor was kind enough to make time during GDC to chat about life after Gone Home. The conversation extends beyond that, naturally, digging into his experience designing the layout of Gone Home's home, reading those early reviews and changing the set up of The Fullbright Company. Originally, the crew shared a home in Portland, but now, thanks to a successful game, they've found their own homes.

Looks like I've hit my "home" allowance for the day. That's a wrap, see you tomorrow when we invite the creators of Home Alone to discuss E.T.'s phone home.

(Actually, I think we'll just talk with the folks from Capybara.)

__________________

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Craig The Vagabond Journalist, docking procedure, Elite: Dangerous, Frontier Developments.

I was underwater the first time someone at the Game Developers Conference asked me to take a selfie.

During my demo of World of Diving, an upcoming title that offers procedurally generated environments and social SCUBA diving, the developer showed me how to detach my camera from my diver's body, and I was able to swim around and take a picture of "myself" in front of an underwater statue.

The camera is an in-game item, and you have to bring it up to your virtual eyes and use the viewfinder to take images during the game's missions. We were in the middle of a mission that involved turtle photography, which is more interesting in person than it sounds on paper.

Multiplayer exploration and photography

You see much of your body while diving, and the game will include full customization options for both genders, but for the demo both characters were female.

Richard Stitselaar, the creative director of Vertigo Games, explained the game's tone. "World of Diving is an arcade, multiplayer, online diving adventure. It's not a simulation," he said. You can salvage wrecks, collect treasure, go diving with your friends, create your own treasure hunts and missions, or just take pictures of different fish and structures. It's not meant to be realistic, or to teach you diving, but to allow you to get a feel for what an ideal dive may be like.

They're going to roll out features and environments in waves, and the players who buy the first prototype will be able to vote on what's added next. Do they want better fish AI next, or a submarine? You'll be able to vote to see what should be added next. The game can be played on a standard PC, but will also launch with full support for the Oculus Rift. Up to 16 players will be able to dive together.

The game will be a premium release, with microtransactions. "You pay once, and then play for free after that," he explained. "There are options to buy gear in the game, but it will be vanity items. And 50 percent of the items in the online store will be free anyway."

There was refreshingly little "game" in my demo. We simply dove together, and he pointed out interesting looking fish and we went into a cave, turning on our diving lights so we could see in the darkness. We found a wrecked ship on its side and we explored for a bit, enjoying the act of being inside a structure where everything was stuck at a 90-degree angle.

"50 percent of the items in the online store will be free anyway"

It was strange to feel a sort of claustrophobia inside these caves and wrecks, and the small amount of panic that comes when you look around in the dark and realize you can't see your companion for a moment until Stitselaar explained how to use the in-game icon to find him again. I've done some light cave diving myself in Florida, and the game captures the odd combination of calmness and fear that comes with these underwater environments.

It was stressed that the game wasn't a simulation, but there are a few concessions to the real-world act of diving. You use in-game hand gestures to communicate with other divers. You inflate or deflate your buoyancy control vest to move up and down in the water, just as you would in real life. The game's environments may be procedurally generated so you'll always be able to explore, but the game also includes real-world landmarks that are famous in the world of SCUBA diving.

There will be races using your little propeller-driven craft and timed events where you compete with your friends to do certain tasks, but I had more fun to looking around, taking pictures of fish, and enjoying the sense of being underwater. This is the fun of virtual reality; the act of exploring a new environment was quietly joyful.

The act of exploring your environment and communicating through gestures and nods, taking pictures of your in-game avatar around interesting locations in the game is attractive. I'm skeptical of how fun the game will be on a standard screen, but it was impressive on the Rift.

The first released prototype will consist of a house and swimming pool that you can customize and use to practice your diving, but soon the tunnel to the ocean that you'll find inside your pool will open, and then you'll be able to explore the wider world. "This door will be opened in three weeks or so, after release," he said. "And then the next area, and the next area." As long as people keep buying and voting, it never has to end.

Dynasty Warriors 8 Xtreme Legends Complete Edition is headed to PlayStation 4 March 25 in North America, and Tecmo Koei Games released a trailer this week that shows the game in action.

Press play above to see dozens of warriors bowled over on Sony's latest console.

Dynasty Warriors 8: Xtreme Legends Complete Edition will be released on PS4 and PlayStation Vita and include all of Dynasty Warriors 8's content plus the expansion. The same day, a standalone expansion called Dynasty Warriors 8: Xtreme Legends will be released on PlayStation 3. Tecmo Koei announced late last year that the games are also headed to Europe this spring.