I nearly wrote this entry once before, but I abandoned it when I thought it was obvious, and it is, but I guess I forgot the point I was actually trying to make, since there is a personal outlook I failed to factor into the idea.

The topic of today’s entry is Mating.

Hopefully that word doesn’t attract google (pun not intended initially, but relished)

I was thinking a couple weeks ago about a philosophical outlook by someone I can’t remember (and thus can’t look up) that I read about in my Philosophy of Love PHIL 201 course from waterloo. It basically sounded like the type of thing I might have come up with as a 40 year old virgin (damn you google), were as love, and thus love-making, and thus reproduction, were sort of the things our genes trick us into doing. There was one quote that I remember and will certainly misquote here, but paraphrasing, they said that giving in to sexual desire made one (temporarily) the fool of the species. I had two problems with this (three if you could how it sounds like bitter recriminations), one: Without it, there would be no one around to say that it makes us the fools of the species as there would be no species at all. And two: What else would we be doing? Somehow I feel it is possible to think the high thoughts, attain the high immutable truths (if any) while still partaking of love in it’s various (albeit silly-looking) forms. In fact, another philosophical theory states that one cannot even contemplate the high uttermost truth/knowledge/philosophy while baser desires go unfullfilled.

Anyway, it was the “fool of the species” I was thinking about.. since I feel like it often, not really with the “of the species” part, but just foolish trying to invoke relationships since it seems quite labourious, futile, and most notably a shock to the other person that you were steering the conversation in that direction. However, I’ve tended to think my pursuits are a little less tarnished than some others’ statements of love might be. Some people might speak in flowery words only to gain a chance to mate, and then flee. Indeed this seems to be a theme that goes back a long while. Here is quote from Hamlet I remember from highschool, from father to daughter:

Ay, springes to catch woodcocks. I do know,
When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul
Lends the tongue vows: these blazes, daughter,
Giving more light than heat, extinct in both,
Even in their promise, as it is a-making,
You must not take for fire. From this time
Be somewhat scanter of your maiden presence;
Set your entreatments at a higher rate
Than a command to parley. For Lord Hamlet,
Believe so much in him, that he is young
And with a larger tether may he walk
Than may be given you: in few, Ophelia,
Do not believe his vows; for they are brokers,
Not of that dye which their investments show,
But mere implorators of unholy suits,
Breathing like sanctified and pious bawds,
The better to beguile. This is for all:
I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth,
Have you so slander any moment leisure,
As to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet.
Look to’t, I charge you: come your ways.

I more remember the analysis we did at the time, rather than retain the ability to analyze it now. My skills at this ye olde english are not good (actually, I beleive this is considered New English, as is ours, while Canterbury Tales is Middle, and Beowolf is Old, and is truly incomprehensible to the uninitiated). Anyway, basically, Hamlet is on the make, wants Ophelia in the physical sense, but has no real further desire. His fire has little light, and less heat, not to beleive his vows, etc. And of course, it’s still easy to see that, from friends, to media, there are many who do this, at least until they get older, wiser and settle down or something, whatever it is those people do.

But I thought, I’m not like them, when I pledge my affection, it is for that reason alone, I am not trying to beguile. But then I think to the point at the top of this entry, that we are fools, in a way. This can be analyzed fairly simply, why are certain things attractive, or rather, cause arousal. It’s like asking why breathing feels good (after say, not being able to do it for a while)… because it’s how we developed, it’s intrinsic to our nature. If I were making love, I wouldn’t need to think that it is arousing to be aroused… I’d be too busy being aroused, plus it’s all handled above the level we are able to control, for the most part. I liken it to the kind of instant processing someone will do to determine if someone is attractive to them, they may not be entirely sure of the actual determining aspects themselves, they just know it when they see it, since it’s the parts working away above their conscious interpretation just sending them pre-processes “TRUE” or “FALSE” signals.

My concern then, is how can I be sure about my own intentions, motivations, etc. I can’t get direct access to the outside unfiltered inputs any more than anyone else, so I can quite easily be convinced of my own shiny intentions, while at the higher level, my brain is just trying to trick me into things another way… can’t win a heart with an ugly body, so go for the sincerity. Possible, and of course, utterly untestable. That’s the problem with philosophy, it’s always in search of questions that it knows it damn well can’t answer, not really.

When I started taking philosophy, I used to think that it would be this cool, intellectual screw you to idiots I had to contend with when I was a child, but as I started taking courses, I was just bored. Some of it was interesting, but actually sitting down and reading Plato was just tiresome, and I rarely got the point. When I finally did get the point of some of it, it turns out some of it was stuff I had come up with, except they came up with it first, many many many years ago. So I guess that leads me to a unixism that I’ll adapt.. those who haven’t learned philosophy are doomed to re-invent it, poorly.

For the moment, I’ll beleive in my own convictions as the truth. Not that it matters, as I get a whole lotta “FALSE” from people anyway.

I had written about this later on when she had been found, her body anyway. Here is the text from my entry Hellfire, which was part of my old journal, reprinted here.

Cecilia Zhang’s body was finally found. For anyone who doesn’t pay attention to Toronto news (which must be quite a number of people), she was kidnapped in october. Being cynical, I figured the worst, although the police were reportedly optimistic that she was being held for profit. I had been following this story since it started. Though I was not optimistic, stranger things had happened, like Elizabeth Smart’s case… Cecilia’s remains were recently discovered, and I have no personal doubt that she was taken, raped and murdered in fairly quick order. This is the legacy of my gender. I have never wished harder that the christians are right, and that there is a hell, because the man who did this should burn, very slowly, for a very very long time.

Of course, this goes on a lot, and every now and then the media latches onto a specific case. I’m not sure how to feel about that, I guess it’s a balance between reporting all the news all the time between the occurance and the resolution, and giving an architype like report, to remind us of the evil that surrounds, permeates, and is, us…

Cecilia, we’re sorry.

I’m somewhat pleased to know that I was wrong, always assuming the that the self-confessed murderer, now charged and having pled guilty, is telling the truth about what happened. I don’t know if it’s any real comfort to anyone, that she died of smothering during the kidnapping. I thought perhaps it was, but then thinking about it… what would I prefer? To have my raped, beaten, tortured daughter returned to me alive, or have her bones, she who may not have suffered much, perhaps, but is still gone forever.

During this, and other such cases, my mind repeatedly goes back to a game I played, Chrono Trigger. It was an RPG, where you started off as a party of one, Crono, who met up with a bunch of other characters and could create a party of 3, but always with you, Crono, in it… until you die. You are utterly destroyed by the evil monster when you encounter it too early (but are scripted to do so of course). The rest of your party escapes, and returns to the End of Time (the game heavily involves time travel and time manipulation). The Guru of Time tells you there is only one possibility for saving Crono, and gives you the Chrono Trigger, which is just a symbol of changing time, but time can only be changed if the timelines will allow it (in defiance to the changes in the timeline made in the game already by your actions, but whatever). You get a clone of Crono (in fact, a doll won at a fair that looks exactly like him) and return in time to the moment he died, and invoke the trigger.
Time is stopped, and you are able to swap out Crono for the doll, and leave, time resumes, and for all intents and purposes, Crono is killed there and then, the timelines have no disagreement about that… but he is also saved.

I have wished such a thing were possible, of course if obviously requires travelling in time, but say you couldn’t make any changes since the changes were already integrated into the pre-travel timeline… at least with the Chrono Trigger concept, it may not be impossible.

And then look at Cecilia Zhang, smothered and put in a trunk. When he checked on her later, already dead. If ever a time machine could exist, would it not be a perfect time to swap a perfectly created (but unalive) clone for her, and revive her. He even seemed surprised that she had died, perhaps this has happened already… the religious are not the only ones who engage in wishful thinking I suppose. Hopefully my thoughts to a video game are not too distasteful given the subject matter.

…
Sadder still, is how her parents pleaded for her return, how the police suspected she was alive, and why not, for at least a day or two you’d figure, time to do something…. but she was dead before her dissapearance was even discovered, no time for anything. And the reason for her kidnapping at all… pointless…

The media is as fixated on this case I have been. It’s not particularly good, or fair, to focus on the deaths of particularly fair and young girls, but still in our collective unconscious they represent the upmost innocent, and the photographs of Cecilia herself almost appear to be an advertisement for innocense. Perhaps the media should shine a bit more light around to the other cases, but once in a while one comes along like a sign post to show you exactly how bad things have gotten.

Everyone always says it, so I will as well: “I can’t imagine how it must be for the parents.” It’s almost enough to make you not want to have children at all, to know your sanity will be determined by the wellbeing of offspring that you’ll want to do anything to protect, but know that you never could possibly do so all the time. You never know who will be waiting outside the window.

We’re still sorry

More information about this on wikipedia

I haven’t posted in a while, mainly for the simple reason that my life has recently been entirely occupied by work and sleep, and I’ll leave it to you to guess how balanced those two factors are.

In the brief period I give myself between getting home and going to bed, I’ve been playing around with my old Duke Nukem levels, almost completely inspired by the negative review I gave Duke in an earlier post regarding women in games, heh, but still, I liked my old levels. They were based on The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, with a sort of weird attempt at a flowing story throughout the series of levels. It was my attempt at making an episode for the game, but it was hardly a Total Conversion. I created some levels, added some custom art, made a couple sounds, and altered the CON files to bind it all together.

The story was basically that you, Duke, were a friend of Ford Prefect (one of the few aliens he didn’t wish to kill apparently). And that you escaped the destruction of the earth with him and Arthur, and of course, you wish to bring your curses home to the Vogons. You start the first level in an airlock waiting to be blasted into deep space along with Ford and Arthur who were ejected from the adjoining airlock moments before. Of course, the regular enemies in the game have taken on the role of the vogons (and anyone else I wanted, since the only non-combat characters are strippers and prostitutes, *sigh*)

The levels span most of the books, the first one was actually the first level I ever made, and it shows. The textures used and the architecture looks dissociative, the keycards are in impossible and completely hidden locations, it’s a mess. But still, I think, better than some of the other maps I had played at the time.

The level spawned a sequel, and then others, spanning the first three books. That was it for a very long time, as I created those levels back when I was in highschool. I can’t remember exactly when, I think grade 11 or something, which is many years ago now.

Sometime later, I got back into Duke Nukem for a bit, and resolved to make a new level in the series. It would be based on So Long and Thanks for All the Fish. It was a tricky level to conceive since most of the book takes place on a mysteriously re-appearing earth, and there wasn’t much for Duke to have done there. So I followed some of Ford’s story instead, and had Duke teleport from place to place, using elements from the books and other books (even have a bit from Young Zaphod Plays it Safe). But it was never finished, and never released. Why? Well, I had many many problems with getting that level working with Duke Nukem’s engine. I wasn’t doing anything particularly silly I think, the engine just couldn’t handle it for some reason. There were points that always seemed to crash the game out with the dreaded Page Granular Limit or whatever it was. It became impossible to play. The other levels suffered from this as well, but less often. I never did figure out what the problem was, just didn’t like me I guess.

Anyway, having become interested in Duke Nukem again, I did some vague searched on the interweb to see if anything was going on with it recently. Turns out that the source code had been released, and people had made ports. That was years ago, and I had sort of missed the boat, however, there were a couple highly regarded ports still online, so I downloaded one. It ran well, and it ran my levels, and it runs on XP without difficulty, so I decided to fix up my levels and re-release them, since it’s now possible to play them on windows (well, the old released game still runs under XP, but not well).

So that’s what I’ve been doing, working on the levels, fixing them up, and working on the last one, finishing it, so I can release them again. I actually had to do some significant fixing to the original levels. See, the port I’m using, JFDuke3d has a couple of problems with stuff I had been doing in my original maps, that the old engine had no problems with, so I’ve had to go fix them.

Here’s a list off the top of my head:
Activators – Activators are special sprites used in the game (among others) that, er, activate certain game effects, like you put one in a door and wire it to a switch and the switch toggles the activator, and the activator opens the door. Also, all sprites have HiTags and LoTags, which are just numbers that, depending on the sprite, mean something to it (so you’d best keep an eye on the documentation). Anyway, in my levels, since it’s following a story, I often need things that happen once. So like you do something that shouldn’t be undone, like lower a door that causes the lower half of a sign to sink into a building (heh, it’s in the books, though I used what the game engine allowed me to mimic the effect). So you wire up a touchplate sprite to an activator, so when you step in the sector, the effect happens. You give the touchplate a HiTag of 1 to indicate it should only happen once. I gave the activators a HiTag of 1 as well, erroneously. Did no harm in the official engine, but in this port, it just doesn’t work. Many things needed fixing.

Time tunnel – I had, admitted, stolen this effect from a different map. It was a neat effect sort of reminiscent of the original Star Gate movie travel effect. It involved a really long tunnel with appropriate textures, where you made the floor of the tunnel a conveyor belt (in effect) moving really fast, and you also lower the ceiling to nearly the floor, and give the sector a water-top designation (so you sort of sink in it, but you can’t actually go underwater). Anyway, this use to work marginally well in the released engine. In the new engine you instantly die, since it seems that you’re being crushed (which is true, but the old engine handled it since you teleported into it and didn’t seem to care, oh well. Raise the ceiling a bit.

Inescapable water – You denote an underwater sector by giving it a specific LoTag. If you happen to be in a sector adjoining it without that lotag, and walk into the water one, you instantly become “under water” but the screen doesn’t tint blue, but everything else appears to work. I had used that effect, not really on purpose, but just because I needed to have you teleport underwater. (Not as part of the going-under-water effect, which is in fact just a teleportation, but actually teleporting to a location underwater). Anyway, on the old engine it worked fine, but in the port it seems to dislike the effect of being underwater without having actually submerged through the usual method, so when you try to surface a little while later, the water-ceiling won’t let you pass. I’ve fixed it by having the teleportation occur above a small area of water so you submerge properly.

Parallax sky – This one was really irritating. Many of my parallaxed skies were messed up. I had used, in many areas (especially in the Krikkit wars level) the lava texture with a different palette to make it look like a storm (or in this case, a dustcloud). It worked reasonably well, and it worked in the original engine. In the port, it just gets screwed up, hard to describe. It seems just not to like the resolution, 64*64, while it handles the 64*400 res textures well enough. So I made a duplicate of one of the other textures and fiddled with it. It’s not animated, but at least it works again.

Anyway, I’m also taking advantage of some of the things allowed me in the game because the port is for the Atomic Edition (which I never had, only the original, so my levels were based off that engine as well). Since a lot of my levels are story based, and involves the need to go one way (like you’re in a ship, you escape before it crashes, use the teleporter to get to a planet, and you shouldn’t be able to teleport back to your supposedly destroyed ship). I had to do all sorts of funky things to mimic one-way teleporters. Now, with this engine, compatible with the Atomic Edition (which included the one-way wonders), I’ve been able to fix up my game to take advantage of them.

Most of the fixup work is done, just needing to finish off the last level. I’ve been thinking of starting a new one, based around elements of the last book. Then that would be all of them.

I plan to give a rundown of amusing stuff in each level here eventually, if only to post more.

Executive Summary: So very angry, more (un)interesting battles against utilities, and my own computer.

So I come home from work Thursday to find my internet out. I reboot the modem but it never gets past the opening handshake as indicated by the modem itself, which is “good” in my eyes since it’s not just my computer being stupid (which it has been before). So I phone up rogers help line, and get an automated assistant who tried to guess at my problem by recognizing a phrase, rather than asking individual questions.

I try the direct approach a customer might if they hadn’t had to deal with one of these souless minions of orthodoxy before, I say “My Internet is out. My Cable TV is out”, and it immediately directs me to sales, since obviously I am in need of internet and TV. Hang up, dial again. Main Menu. Then I try the direct approach, I say “Technical Support”, that at least gets me where I want to go. Then it asks what kind of thing I need help with, Cable TV, Internet, Phone, whatnot. This is very odd to me since they have separate numbers to phone (I chose the TV since it was the most obvious), but they just seem to go to the same system.

Anyway, I get a guy who tells me that there is an outage in my area, and not to worry, it’s being worked on. “Oh, okay, thanks”, I figure, it’s being worked on, I’m exausted, I can wait until tomorrow because, I’m sure, By Then Everything Will Be Fixed. The support guy must have been laughing after he hung up.

Friday, no change, angry, I phone again, asking for an estimate on the outage. “Outage? No, there hasn’t been an outage in your area… it seems just to be your unit. I’ll send a guy out, how about Saturday 2-5?” Oh good, I get to hang around waiting for someone, fine, okay. So they lied to me about the outage, that’s a strike. And my service went down at all, that’s a strike, perhaps, wait and see…

So the next day the guy comes, at like 11 or so. Lucky I was up and cleaning already (but I think the guy phoned just to get it over with, he was just in the area and thought he could take care of it faster if I was willing, so I do appreciate that). He didn’t bother with coming up (which is good cause my efforts at cleaning were ineffective) but he did phone me several times asking me to watch my TV so he could tell which line was mine.

Why should he have to do that, surely the line was marked, right? Wrong. He told me the problem was that when my line was installed, it wasn’t marked, so someone (likely a Rogers Employee I’m figuring) saw it, figured it was old, and ripped it out. So they botched my installation, Strike 2, and they ripped it out because of it causing me this problem to start with. Strike 3… maybe that shouldn’t count as a strike because it’s really because of 2, but still, they just raised their prices for no good reason, so they can take the other strike.

The guy phoned up once the TV was working and said he was going to check the levels for the modem (from his truck), and if it needed to be adjusted, he’d phone to get into the building. So I left my computer alone for a while… I figured 20 minutes was enough, and with no word, I tried to use the net.

Nothing would work, everything instantly failed with no connection errors. So I figured, a reboot would probably do everyone some good. So I did. And the damn Rogers/Yahoo self healing program I let it install when I first got the connection said, very helpfully I must add, I had no connection. Spiffy. It recommended rebooting the router, and then the computer. Fine, I’ll play it’s little game. I did both, rebooted, and it came up again. This time offering to release and renew the IP address. I had tried that with ipconfig earlier to no avail, but go ahead….. timing….. out…… And the the self-help thing just cycled itself and started over with suggesting rebooting the router and then the computer. Go to hell Self-Healing thingy.

Figuring the cable guy was long gone and everything was fine from their end, I phone the High-Speed Internet helpline which got me to the same place as all the others, and got a human and told him my sob story. So he looked at the modem remotely… everything was fine, levels are good, connection is great (his words). But…. no computer on the other side… no IP address (Yep, I know).

So he has me go into my XP Network Settings and right click on my LAN connection object and go to the properties. Now… I must admit, as geeky as I may seem, if there is an area of computing I know incredibly little about, Networking is definitely one of them. I never really learned anything about the archane methods and tools available to me. Sure, in theory I know stuff, but how can I map these stupid XP icons to that theory? Anyway, he was expecting my LAN object to have details about the kinds of connections it supports. Nope, and then he got very confused, which confused me. So then I mentioned I have this thing called Network Bridge. Apparently it allowed me to bridge my network connections (uuuughgh, hmm), I never really paid attention to it since up until now, Everything Just Worked. But the tech guy was in shock, he’d never heard of anyone having that in there. He asked if I could uninstall it. Now, I’m a little wary of uninstalling components of my computer at the behest of someone over the phone, call me cautious. But I did see that I could remove connections from the bridge without uninstalling the component itself (since disabling it didn’t really have the effect I wanted). Anyway, as soon as I did that, everything started waking up, like MSN and ICQ.

Well joy, to get back to where I was on Wednesday, I had to change my settings because my cable was physically disconnected. What? No, I don’t understand either. I’ve looked up stuff on the bridge, and as I far as I can tell, it was just bridging my Firewire (connected to nothing) and my LAN (connected directly to the modem), so I don’t see why this suddenly decided to botch. He asked me how that was configured like that, and I said it was like that the whole time, but I bet it was as a result of running the Windows Internet Connection Helper Wizard Thingy many many times over the course of being at the university where my computer was exposed to many irritating LAN setups. Since this used to work with Rogers, and not now, I’m giving them a half strike for that as well.

I’m giving myself another half strike for yet again knowing nothing about Networking with my own damn computer. Perhaps one day I’ll learn.

Almost in response to my earlier post on women in videogames, but not quite since the response arrived before my post, and was in preproduction for longer, and .. well, whatever. It is interesting that some time after my post I find tell of a game that sort of tries to reverse the Damsel in a Dress cliche plotline I mentioned before.

Super Princess Peach is the game, and boy, is it pink. I haven’t played it, not likely to either, but the screenshots indicate quite the pinkness. And it shows that even when they try to reverse the trend, and give us the flipside, in this case being that the Princess is to rescue Mario, they screw it up (in my opinion) by making it cutesy, and rediculous.

Hell hath no fury like the princess’ wild mood swings

I seem to recall that in Super Mario Brothers 2, the Princess did quite well as a character, all by herself. In this game however, she has a parasol, as her main weapon. Well, at least it isn’t a frying pan, or say a vacuum cleaner like Marge had in that weird Simpsons arcade game. But still, I guess the umbrella is her ‘Yoshi’.

Where…. *sob* … is … *sob* …. my….. *sob*… lithium

What I think is sillier, is the special abilities she’s endowed with. Which are, essentially, her womanly runaway emotions. When you power up anger, you’re all firery and boomy. When you power up your amazing capacity for sadness, you let loose torrents of salt water that somehow inspire the plants around you to grow. Happiness causes you to trip out and float around the screen. And apparently there is a Restore-Life emotion that I wish I possessed myself.

I see angry, happy and sad, that last one must be climax

So you, your parasol that eats people while smiling, go in, beat easy easy enemies (remember, this game is for girls), and rescue Mario. I say she should leave him for Luigi, but what do I know.

I’m being intentionally hard on this game, partly for the laugh. I mean, obviously this is meant for little girls, but I think even little girls are capable of thinking little of a condescending, non-challenging game where everything is a uniform shade of hyper-pink.

If they truly wanted to exploit women, what they should do is just release two versions of a mario game, the normal one where Mario shows what a stud he is, and the alternate with the Princess in the drivers seat. That way they will still sell the original to all the boys, probably sell the personalized ones to the girls, and probably a number to those people who want every possible edition of everything who will buy both. To sweeten the deal, make it so they are slightly different, and call it Pokemon. Then watch the cash flow.

I’ve been thinking about this entry for a while, so I’ve sat down and I’m going to try to type the thing. Basically, it’s about the role of women in videogames (in the videogames themselves) while having done absolutely no research, heh, but it’s an opinion piece, so you can leave taking away that I’m just crazy and forget it.

So what we seem to have these days, is an increase in female characters in strong, leading positions, but it seems the people making the characters almost always get it wrong (assuming what they are trying to get right is making female characters feministically acceptable, which I’ll probably have to define later, but it’s more of a feeling than a defined state, plus I just made it up).

Let’s start at the beginning, women didn’t play games, they didn’t care (apparently), well, girls I guess, since at the time, video games were for a younger audience, things like PacMan. So they come up with Ms. PacMan, which was actually a surprisingly good step when you think about it. They added a Bow, okay, stereotypical, she’s adorning herself, but when the original character was a pizza with a slice missing, it certainly seems acceptable. And hey, it’s not like they added two really big yellow circles just ahead of her intersecting with the body, and bobbing along as she moved.

Well, actually, if you read the history of Pacman itself from the original creator, it seems that the point of the original Pacman was to appeal to women, and that the Ms. Pacman bit was just a gimmick later on. But when I read his inspiration, I think it’s a little chilling, don’t you?

“So there I was, wondering what sort of things women would look for in a video game. I sat in cafés and listened to what they were talking about: mostly it was fashion and boyfriends. Neither of those was really the stuff of a good video game. Then they started talking about food – about cakes and sweets and fruit – and it hit me: that food and eating would be the thing to concentrate on to get the girls interested.”

- Toru Iwatani http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-1718312,00.html

I don’t know, something about that makes me feel depressed. I wonder if Pacman were created now, that after eating all the dots you needed to get to the middle section and vomit all the dots up before moving on the next level, oh, and the bonus items would now be worth negative points, and would spawn immediately in your way.

What the last step of each level would be if it had been made today

Okay, so his reasons weren’t great, in my humble opinion, but still, something for the girls. Well, also, a way to market to girls to get their lovely money, if I were to be cynical about it, but when have I ever been cynical… really.

But as a yellow dot goes, it’s not like it was revolutionary anyway, more like lip service. It seems that the big jump to a positive female gaming role model would be in the form of Samus Aran. I was never part of the group that played it at the time, in fact, I started with Metroid II, and never played the original until quite recently. From what I heard, it was a bit of a stir when it was revealed that under that suit was a woman, especially since the instruction manual referred to the character as a He, so either they were trying to throw players off, or they were just as surprised as everyone else. The nifty thing about the character, all the way through to the 3D Metroid Prime (the last Metroid game I played) was that there was no inherent sexuality involved. The character was a woman, in a suit, so it dodged any Lara-Croft’ian problems, which might be a cop-out, but at least it’s neutral…

Except of course, whenever they get the basic idea right, they ruin it utterly and miss the point. For it’s been a sort of tradition now, in Metroid games, that you get ‘rewards’ for completing the game fast enough, and with enough of the items, so that in the credit sequence, various things happen. In Super Metroid, if you finish the game in less than three hours, you get to see Samus in what I can only describe as a bathing suit, no doubt required for her suit to function. So hurrah, strong female character, itty bitty bathing suit. Alas.

Obviously they wanted to remove any lingering doubt as to her gender

Okay, so lets move away from the strong female leads, into the damsels in distress. These are easy to pick on, but I will anyway. So we’ve got a mustachioed Italian plumber rescuing princesses left, right and center. At least the princess got out and started fighting a bit herself in Super Mario Bros II, the Doki Doki Panic hijacked game. Sure, she was in a dress, but somehow that allowed her to float, which was a characteristic I liked since I’m terrible at the tricky jumping crap. Mario seems to be ceaselessly rescuing this woman, well, Princess Toadstool in most of the games, but Princess Daisy in the gameboy game, perhaps others, I wasn’t paying enough attention.

Link is just as bad in this regard, always rescuing Zelda, for the same reasons (damsel in distress archetype), but a Link to the Past made this worse, she was captured a number of times, as well as several other girls, and they are supposed to be all magical, but of course are defenseless. Zelda herself doesn’t appear to be overtly sexualized yet, so her being a playable character in a Zelda game (perhaps, where she rescues Link, hmm?) would be compelling enough. In Wind Waker, the last Zelda game I played, she at least was a decent character, but not playable and not very active herself, until the very end, where she helpfully shot light arrows at you. Thanks. Maybe the new one will do something more with her, Twilight Princess I think it’s called, might be promising.

Scene from Link: A Zelda to the Past

I’m on a never ending quest to save my boyfriend

I should perhaps now talk about a game that did things pretty well. American McGee’s Alice is one that stands out for me. It’s just you, a slightly grown up Alice, against a deranged wonderland. You are neither attractive nor not, somehow striking a good balance that is more easily seen in male characters in other games, where they are neither chiseled nor lanky. She is herself, running around wonderland, with a knife. Though she does sob a lot through the story, it all makes sense and is perfectly orchestrated, it makes you wish you could fight your own demons as literally. I enjoyed playing the character, and I wasn’t outraged once. The nifty story and environment helped too.

At this point, the narrator was running out of ideas

In terms of sexism on all sides, there can hardly be a better example than Duke Nukem. Both 3D and the Manhattan Project 3D-sidescroller thingy that came later (under license). Now, I liked Duke Nukem 3D, I thought it was a great game, but there were also the naughty bits. It had really great environments, not just dank dungeons like Doom and Quake, but places that looks like what they were, if, unfortunately, theaters of and dance halls of ill repute. The story hopped along well enough, challenge was decent, enemies were, well, lacking somewhat, but had interesting characteristics. It’s also the only game I took my hand at creating maps for, making a semi-completely and mostly terrible Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy run of maps, with the story of Duke following on the heels of Arthur and Ford across the various locations, Vogon Ship, Magrathea, Heart of Gold, Milliways, Frogstar C, Krikkit, and others, while killing ‘Vogons’ who looked suspiciously like the aliens having been killed up to this point. Ah, memories.

But it was sometimes difficult populating those maps, since, and I think this is a telling point, that the only non-hostile animated and interactive ‘people’ in the game were either strippers, prostitutes, or women held or killed by alien intervention. I swear that in Lameduke, a really fantastically crappy alpha of the game released for fun by 3D Realms, that there was a male, normal, NPC… but I could be wrong, hard to recall. In any case, basically the prostitute was the only useful one since out of the context you normally found them in the game, they still looked like they could belong elsewhere. While the dancing and stripping women did not. Not at a cricket match, in any event.

Yes, we have much to answer for. This is true.

Duke Nukem 3D, in addition to having these sprites in the game at all, decided to make them interactive as well, in two ways that I think caused upset in some circles at the time. Firstly, you could walk up to them, the dancers, strippers and prostitutes and hit the USE button, which otherwise activated things in the game, and you would give them money, say something like “Shake it Baby”, and the strippers would, in exchange, flash you and shake their.. er, tassels, at you. Of course, this illicit act is pixilated all to hell and isn’t alluring, but it’s still something that might have best been left on the drawing board (but given the things reportedly seen and done in GTA: San Andreas, I suppose it could have been worse)

Which brings me to the second thing you can do in Duke Nukem with these characters that brings us to that worseness, which is kill them. You can blow away any of the NPC’s, which range from the strippers, to the alien-goop-bound girls. When you do, Duke says “Dammit” to himself (we’re really feeling for him at those times) and usually, this causes more enemies to appear. So I guess that’s one thing, it punishes you for killing them. To me, that’s not too bad really. But if they had some male NPC’s, and didn’t sexualize them as much, then it would have just been by-standers getting killed and it would be up to the player to avoid them since it just produced more enemies.

But, from the pictures, pixilated as they may be, I think the game goes overboard. And also for male sexism too, look at him, all muscle, all attitude, probably flooded with steroids. He screams he male version of the sexist attitude, but it doesn’t affect men as much it seems. Well, researchers say that it does have some effect, and I can well believe that. But for some reason, a man can just be a man, as long as he’s not grotesquely fat or ugly or anything. I have yet to see a game where a serious lead character was some fat guy, because no one, not guys, nor women, would want to play such a character. But you can have an average built guy character, but the women have to be these bombshells.

Now it gets tricky after that, why would women want this anyway, why aspire to the female “ideal” (and I really do mean the quoting there). They do seem overly preoccupied with how they look. Of course, there’s a trap right there, as from their point of view, men might be thought of as insufficiently preoccupied by how they look, suggesting some baseline “normal” level, that itself shares the type of quotes I put around “ideal” earlier. I really don’t know, but back to Duke Nukem 3D

Duke standing on a broken barrel with money in his hand

If you need further evidence of this game’s general sexist theme, one need only listen to the last bit of audio once you beat the game.
Duke: “My name’s Duke Nukem. After a few days of R & R, I’ll be ready for more action”
Woman: “Ohh, come back to bed Duke. I’m ready for some action, now!”
[grunting, moaning, and Duke ending with a bit of a laugh]

Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project took the character and the attitude to a 3D sidescroller, where to beat each level you needed to find a key, and also disarm a bomb that would mutate some captured pneumatic woman. On rescuing them, they show their appreciation by jumping up and down. I decided to fix her reaction by quoting Rocky Horror Picture show.

Ooooh, burn! Duke is denied! [general Fox audience noises]

I remember an article, can’t seem to find it (but as this is still an opinion piece, I’ll just say stuff without evidence). Anyway, I remember this article about a game development studio that was working on a title, and they were trying to decide whether to have multiple characters. I don’t recall if the change was anything other than cosmetic, but they had a guy character, and a girl character, and they found themselves asking internally if people played one more than the other, and if so, why? And as it turned out from their own investigation, no one was really playing the male character, and the reasons are kind of funny. Girls play girls, since it’s a reflection of themselves in the game-world they are in. Guys, however, play girls, since they like looking at girls. Huzzah.

Of course, the above recollection doesn’t make a whole lot of sense (it did play out like that, but I can’t remember why exactly they did their investigation) since most games give different skills to the different playable classes, so playing as a woman would be different than playing as a man (if those were the only options)

Which is sort where the title of this entry comes from, since I’m reminded of Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance. It was the first of that series-types-whatever of games I had played. Curtis and I were playing as a duo (not the whole time, we imported around a bit), I played as the gruff Dwarf, and he played as the unnecessarily buxom and pert Elven Sorceress. And it’s funny how that went, since of course the woman is weak in nearly every way, which were two important ways: Firstly, she couldn’t carry much, and half the point of the areas was to get weapons and then sell them for gold to buy the good stuff later on. Secondly, she couldn’t really fight. She had some spells, but it was a lot of hit and run tactics when Curtis was playing alone. There were areas early in the game (when we had been playing separately) where I had run up and just slashed my way through, where he had to cast, cast, cast, refill on mana, and cast again to survive. Then we teamed up, I went barreling in, while I got magic backup. And we both got experience as we went, and the Sorceress got quite powerful in fact. Ball Lightning, a somewhat cheap semi-area affecting spell, was leveled up until basically it killed everything before I could get there, even when using my Dwarven Magic Flatulence. Still, she couldn’t carry much. Now I’m not sure what the point of this section was, oh well.

And I think the telling factor of the Tomb Raider series is that when I was looking for game shots, I also found lots of fairly suggestive fan art, and then the fairly suggestive game shots on which they were based. There’s not much of a challenge there, people have been going after that series for years.

90% of the polygon count was allocated to the stars of the game

Here’s one final bit from a game I liked way back when I played in arcades. It was called Astyanax, but being a non-word, it took me quite a long time to track down a ROM for it. I played through it in MAME, it’s your typical side scrolling monster killing quarter guzzler. You’re some muscle bound guy, hurrah, killing monsters and grasshoppers, hurrah, and then in one of the later levels, you attack women. Okay, fine, but part of defeating them is cutting off their tops, they expose themselves (in 16 by 16 pixel glory) and run around embarassed, where you can finish them off without further defiance. How sporting.

Will I get 1000 points if I disrobe someone? Now that’s imitatable

And I think it’s important to show that, at least in a single sample, that it’s not just the games alone that have succum to this effect, but even in the basic notion of 3D gaming itself. Here again is the picture of the 3D game programming book I bought a while ago. I rest my case…. oh, sorry, I thought that was just a figure of speech… case closed.

3D basics: vectors, matricies, half-naked-ninja-women

Anyway, I think I’ve prattled on enough. I don’t offer any solutions, just pointing out some of our past difficulties. I think, and hope, that as more women enter the technical fields, such as programming, and become involved in these projects, that there will be a balancing out of concept and perhaps women will be portrayed better. Unless this is what everyone wants, women included.

In which case sorry for wasting your time

This article is presented as was originally not published in MathNEWS many years ago. It was rejected because the editors were simply too wimpy (opinion, not libel) of its content, and I always felt mathnews, as part of mathSOC, was pretty cliquey. Also, considering the quality of the other articles accepted, I didn’t really have that much hope. The only thing I’m really embarassed about in this is the Seinfeld reference.

A Virgin’s Guide to Sex

This article is directed and intended for those of us who are both mathies, and virgins (in pretty much every sense). You know who you are, the shy, those who go to a party and lean against the wall, probably trying to avoid being spotted as you didn’t have any friends to invite you.

This is presented as a series of points, to help speed reading of the article, and so they can be referenced quickly later (but please, not when attempting what is described below, nothing wisens a person to the inexperience of their partner than when they are caught referencing a manual). This article has been modified from it’s original version, it has been changed to fit your page. I suggest you get the wide-page version.
(This article assumes a certain amount of knowledge. If you don’t get the ‘mulva’ joke from Seinfeld, now would be a perfect time for you to stop reading.)

Some general points:

-Guys, if you must, you can gauge your successes in your head, but do not volunteer this information to your friends, or it might get back to the girl, and does increase the chances of saying “boobies, score!” at an inopportune moment.

-Do not complement the fiddly bits on your girlfriend. If you say “You’ve got amazing [insert part(s) here]!” then she might believe that you would rather exclusively date those parts, take them out dancing and out for coffee afterwards. While this in and of itself is not much of a problem, the girl to which they are attached might feel left out. This also applies to girls staring at guy-ass, but this is much less of a problem as guy-ass is nasty anyway.

-It is probably a good idea to know your lovers name before engaging in sexual relations, as you might resort to moaning out the names of ex’s, family pets, and deities who would probably not like to be called on at that moment.

-Remember guys, No means No. I’m sure no girl would be interested in your lengthy mathematical proof that No, in fact, does equal Yes, no matter how many lemmas you use.

-Please, for the love of Bob, do not use math-related pickup lines like “Let’s integrate baby”, or even worse, if you’re a CS major, ones like “I’m gunna mount your drive” or “Programmers ‘do it’ bit by bit”.

-Never ask your friends for advice on sex and relationships. If you are reading this article for advice on sex and relationships, then you probably don’t have any friends anyway, or you would have asked them first. The risk about asking friends is that they might not have had ever been with anyone either, so any advice they give is likely to be absolutely wrong or very dangerous, or both. Try not to look at the title of the article at this point.

-Math can never be used to make a sexual joke, no matter how funny you think the integral of e to the power of x is.

-Don’t bother remarking how many times integration has been mentioned thus far, I have my own problems.

-In fact, it’s best not to mention you were ever a mathie, say you were in Arts

Of course, all this doesn’t guarantee that you will find someone. In a search, I once started with a rough approximation of 6,000,000,000 people, halved it for a female population, take the percent that live in this province, another for those of whom I would fit their attraction threshold, and again of whom would fit my attraction threshold, again for religion, language, hobbies, general dispositions, and worked it out to one girl, she didn’t return my call.

Good luck to you

-00010011

Well, perhaps in addition, some elements go against my later feminist attitudes… they were always present, but I think I even might have been a little harsh on some of this, but I think of it more of a parody of people’s behaviour. The part I most relish, to this day, is the last section, where I can say that she did finally return my call, but she was permenantly washing her hair. The hair wants what it wants, alas.

I don’t know about any of you loyal Firefox users, but I had run into a problem recently, and only now discovered how to ’solve’ it. The problem was an odd one: Saving something to disk took waaaaay too long to get underway, like, you’d click a link to something and save it, and then it would take upwards of 30 seconds for it to respond afterwards, just spinning the system. It was a part of the main UI thread I’m guessing, since sometimes the download would complete before FF would respond again.

Anyway, I always have a few things running that I put up as ante against the problem, some software that’s always running playing with my disk *cough*, oh, and my USB drive which I’m never sure if it’s causing problems.

I didn’t really discover the problem until recently, but it acted like it crept up on me, but certainly it occured after installing Firefox 1.5. Anyway, I finally figured out, possibly, what it was.

I never clean out my Downloads window, I tend to just close it. It had, after all the time I’ve used firefox (I think it ported the history from previous versions) gotten so large that adding a new entry to it brought the system down to it’s knees. I had disconnected the USB, closed down everything else and saw it was still happening, so on a whim I clicked the cleanup button… then it took entirely too long to clean up, and then blamo, everything downloads insta-like again.

A lesson kids, always implement such frivolous features as a bounded queue (maybe it already is, maybe my computer just sucks)

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