firehose

flickr user: Andrew Huff

Nintendo fans, mark your calendars for May 20, 2014. As Nintendo announced yesterday, that's the last day you'll be able to use the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection to play hundreds of online games on the Wii and Nintendo DS. Single-player modes for those games will still work, of course, but any parts of the games that require an Internet connection will be completely non-functional in a matter of months.

The shutdown will affect some of both systems' most popular games, some of the best-selling games of all time. Suddenly, over 34 million copies of Mario Kart Wii and 23 million copies of Mario Kart DS will be severely diminished. The tens of millions of people who own the DS Pokemon games will no longer be able to trade their beasts or battle online. Animal Crossing: Wild World and Super Smash Bros. Brawl will be less functional for over 11 million players each.

Sure, as a practical matter, relatively few of these tens of millions of players are still making regular use of online servers for games that are sometimes pushing nine years old. If they were, Nintendo would probably have more interest in continuing to maintain those servers on the theory that it would lead to some more very-long-tail sales for its online-enabled games. On the other hand, Nintendo could be more interested in trying to force more players off its "legacy systems" and on to the Wii U and 3DS, which of course still have active online support.

We received a postcard yesterday describing the plan for a new 9.1 mile long bikeway from Lombard to the Springwater Corridor, generally running between 26th and 29th Avenues.

I thought the most interesting part is a plan to remove 161 on street parking spots on SE/NE 28th between Stark and Glisan. Currently, that area is a nightmare for driving and I can't imagine riding a bike up 28th the way it's set up now.

Anyway, I'm curious what other people think.

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The facts are scarce here, so this will be a short dispatch, but the official Community Twitter account has confirmed that a “G.I. Jeff” episode is in the offing. Here’s what they had to say, followed by a likeness of G.I. Jeff himself. Go nuts.[h/t to Splitsider]

You begin to think about the things that are often taken for granted in games when you find yourself looking through a hole in the wall of a brothel and watching someone get beaten up for sexual pleasure and your first thought is: Haven’t I been here before?

Designers and writers love to make you visit a brothel or a strip club in the course of your adventure through their games, and the above situation happened in the recently released Thief reboot.

How common has this become? You visit either a strip club or a brothel in Max Payne 3, Mafia 2, Silent Hill 2, the Grand Theft Auto series, The Wolf Among Us, the latest Thief, Duke Nukem Forever, The Darkness 2, the Saints Row series, Red Dead Redemption, the Hitman series, Heavy Rain, Bioshock 2, Dishonored, Retro City Rampage, Metro: Last Light, Deus Ex and that's just off the top of my head.

Looking up prostitution on a site like Giant Bomb gets you a much more extensive list, including Bioshock Infinite, Yesterday, Binary Domain, The Witcher 2, Fallout: New Vegas, Risen, Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, Fable, Gotich 2, Neverwinter Nights ... the list goes on. Some form of depiction of strip clubs, brothels, or sex workers in general pervade gaming.

In fact, it's hard to tell where on ends and the other begins. Many strip clubs in games also operate as brothels, and many brothels feature women naked from the waist up. The point is that someone is paying for sex, and you get to see some nudity.

It’s time to give this particular cliché a rest.

Real victimization is more than cheap drama

The use of these locations as shorthand for "seedy, gritty location where criminals meet" cuts across the genre lines, and the use of sex workers as little more than background imagery is already disturbing.

These locations can often tie into ongoing violence against the female characters in the game, as people you meet in these strip clubs or brothels have a tendency to either be beaten as a way to prove that a male character is uncaring and brutal, or they turn up as corpses.

This is a shallow way of exploring a very real societal problem. Violence against sex workers is underreported and often unpunished due to the nature of the work and an unwillingness to go to law enforcement. This is made worse when law enforcement is itself part of the abuse. Lawyers have argued that the murder of sex workers is a lesser crime than the murder of "certain classes of individuals."

These are issues that aren't often discussed, but games tend to be uninterested in telling the human aspect of this story. These characters exist only to die or be beaten in order to flesh out male villains. It’s a version of the Kicking the Dog trope, except in this case the "dog" is a human woman.

"These representations are usually negative, associating prostitutes with social ills and perpetuating stereotypes of sex workers as deviant, subservient to male desire, and victims of violence and drugs," a blog post on The Oldest Game, the official site of a newsgame about the sex trade in Ontario and Quebec, stated. "Player interactions with sex workers can sometimes lead to a ‘health boost’ or some other form of reward within the game. Prostitutes are therefore represented as objects to be exploited for the player’s personal gain."

Lawyers have argued that the murder of sex workers is a lesser crime

The one-dimensional look at the real world exploitation and victimization of sex workers is gross enough, but video game culture often celebrates its use of strip clubs as enjoyably taboo locations.

A press event for Duke Nukem Forever took place inside a real-world strip club, and another party for the game True Crime (later rebranded as Sleeping Dogs under a new publisher) took place in a recreation of the one of the game’s adult establishments, complete with dancing, nearly naked women and hosts talking up the almost exclusively male industry professionals and press who received invitations.

Many games even invite the player to participate by purchasing either a physical sex act or lap dance. These scenes may or may not be interactive, but the point is usually to allow the player to sit back, relax, and enjoy the dancing of a nude or nearly nude woman. These moments don’t move the story ahead in any way, or make a larger point of the environment, as they tend to be pure spectacle. Here is a naked woman who won’t speak, can’t say no, and has to do what you want. Enjoy.

The value placed on these locations, and the nudity offered to the player, is often uncomfortable. The Saboteur required players who purchased the game second hand to pay $5 extra in order to see the nudity. The strip club in that game, it should be noted, operates as your home base.

It’s time to move on

Each of these games can likely make a case for why the strip club or brothel appeared in their game individually. The Wolf Among Us is a hard boiled story of a grizzled detective, and those stories usually include seedy criminal enterprise and women who need to be saved, at least temporarily, from their surroundings. The way a character "uses" a prostitute in that game, complete with magic and ending in murder, is treated as a moment of horror. The brothel in Thief fits the theme of a city in decline, and the decadence of the moneyed upper crust.

In fact, the "madam" of the brothel in Thief stands up to the game's central villain when one of her women is abused. Other games also at least try to inject an interesting character, or some form of context to the sex trade.

Rarely are the women involved in these scenes seen as three-dimensional characters, however. They exist to show their bodies, excite the players, get beaten to prove that other characters or bad, or just to die so the story can move forward. These women are used as set pieces, objects to keep the narrative flowing. That’s an offensive way to treat a population that is already at such a high risk of violence from their employers, customers and law enforcement.

They exist to excite the players, get beaten to prove that other characters or bad, or to die so the story can move forward.

No matter how much one can justify the use of these locations in each particular game, the point remains that they’ve become so common as to be boring and expected. There is no sense that the player is in a place that is frequented by a criminal underclass, these levels have become just another thing that’s expected in narrative games.

Repetition has removed any sense of taboo or commentary. Games use the idea of sex workers with as little thought as the characters they seem to be trying to condemn, and this reliance on a tired cliché has successfully removed any impact this once had on the player.

These levels don't need to be stripped from gaming entirely, but we need to begin to see how tired and lazy they've become when used as shorthand for "gritty underworld location." It's also important to look at the real world cost of normalizing violence against sex workers, or at least responsibly address the fact that designers and writers are using real world suffering as a cheap way to develop their characters. It's time to find other options.

Uber has garnered something of a stigma for its company's occasionally entitled antics, and GQ's Mickey Rapkin wanted to find out whether that appearance carried over to its customers and drivers too. For a week earlier this month, Rapkin began offering rides on UberX, shuttling passengers around Los Angeles to see what it's like as an Uber driver and who it is that asks to be driven around. To some surprise, the crowd was quite diverse: while Rapkin quickly became frustrated with raucous groups headed out to bars, he also drove around a quiet teenager and a pair of doctors. For his full perspective on the cab-driving voyeurism and the world of Uber, head over to GQ's website to read the complete piece.

In a finding that puts even the most well-aged cheese to shame, researchers say they've discovered the world's oldest variety — dating way back to 1615 BC — buried with ancient mummies in China.

As USA Today reports, the cheese was found in clumps on the bodies of well-preserved mummies (including the one shown above) in China's Small River Cemetery Number 5. The location is unique, because bodies interred in the region were essentially freeze-dried, meaning their features, clothing, and culinary accompaniments are still discernible even thousands of years later. In large part, that incredible preservation is due to a combination of dry air, salty earth, and tightly-sealed burial conditions.

The cheese itself, which was found over a series of archeological digs dating back to 2002, was identified using analysis of protein and fat content. Investigators speculate that the cheese was made using a kefir starter (bacteria and yeast) which is then combined with milk. The majority of today's cheeses, in contrast, rely on rennet — an enzyme taken from an animal's gut — to curdle milk and yield a final product. But the kefir strategy, researchers say, makes sense: it's significantly easier because it doesn't necessitate the slaughter of a young animal, and kefir-based cheese is lower in lactose, which aligns with the prevalent lactose intolerance among Asian populations. More details on the researchers' methods and analyses will be laid out in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.