2016 July 28 | AIVAnet

Jul

New Feminist Frequency video dissects ‘Women are too hard to animate’

After shifting its schedule to release shorter, more rapid entries in its series Tropes vs. Women in Video Games earlier this year, the cultural criticism web channel Feminist Frequency posted its latest episode today. It tackles the excuse game studios have given when they don’t include female playable characters: that women are too hard to animate. (Spoiler: they’re not.) When one sex is treated differently in games, the video argues, negative and predatory attitudes proliferate.

The episode’s title comes from the 2014 game showcase convention E3 when Ubisoft’s trailer for Assassin’s Creed: Unity was criticized for lacking any playable women. Their response: animating female protagonists would have been too much work on their tight release schedule. The resulting social media firestorm between critics and supporters brought up a crucial question: how much work are studios willing to put in to include feminine protagonists?

Though Ubisoft would pointedly include Evie Frye as a main character alongside her twin brother in the next year’s Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, show host Anita Sarkeesian lists how long it took other franchises to bring playable female characters into their games. The FIFA series didn’t have women’s soccer teams until its 2015 iteration, while Call of Duty took a decade before 2013’s Call of Duty: Ghosts introducing the ability to choose a female avatar in multiplayer. The Battlefield franchise, on the other hand, still doesn’t allow players to be female.

She also picks apart a common non-inclusion defense that bringing women in to the fray would promote violence against women. As in most things, intention is everything: it’s only promoting abuse if women are being attacked because of their gender. In the Street Fighter games, for example, Chun Li is on relatively equal footing with any of her male combatants and wants to be in the fight.

But when female enemies are dressed sexually while the males are not, the intentional violence becomes an issue. Saints Row: The Third’s ‘Whored Mode’ has players killing waves of women in provocative clothes with the option to do so using a giant purple dildo. 2012’s Hitman: Absolution has an all-female squad of assassins dressed in ridiculous latex getups: it’s pretty clear what the player’s supposed to feel when they gun them down.

“Whenever female combatants are dressed in sexual attire, it sets them noticeably apart from other enemy units. It’s intended to make the players’ encounters with them sexually titillating, and that’s particularly troubling when players’ encounters often involve fighting and killing those characters. Violence against female characters should never be presented as ‘sexy,’” Sarkeesian said. “The way for games to handle female combatants is not to present them as sexualized treats for the player. Rather, it’s to present them simply as combatants who happen to be women fighting alongside their male counterparts on equal footing.”

Some titles, even the mega-million-dollar tentpole games, are starting to do this right: the aforementioned Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate presents women in both the enemy and ally rank-and-file, undifferentiated from men in the same role. Some studios are shrugging off the criticism that having a parity of sexes isn’t realistic to the setting, like having as many female soldiers as male. But games, even ones that draw on historical locations or events like the Assassin’s Creed series, create their own worlds and set the tone for what we will or won’t believe, said Sarkeesian.

“To participate in the worlds games create, we happily accept time travel, superpowers, ancient alien civilizations, the ability to carry infinite items, the idea that eating a hot dog can instantly heal your wounds and a million other fictions. It’s certainly not too much to ask that these fictional worlds give us believable female combatants,” said Sarkeesian.

Representation is key, she concludes: when female combatants are presented as normal and typical, players accept them just fine. And as for believability, unlike those magical healing hot dogs, female combatants actually exist in the real world.

Source: Feminist Frequency (YouTube)

Jul

Facebook just can’t stop growing

In stark contrast to Twitter’s recent woes, Facebook is enjoying what is probably its most successful year-to-date. The social network has reported that it made $6.44 billion in revenue and $2.05 billion in profit this past quarter, which is 59 percent over this time last year. What’s even more amazing is that its user numbers continue to grow: it now has 1.71 billion monthly active users overall, while 1.57 billion of its monthly users are on mobile. Indeed, it now has over 1.03 billion mobile users a day. Mobile is such an avenue of growth for the company that a whopping 84 percent of its advertising revenue came from mobile ads.

One of the ways Facebook is able to drive such numbers is due to its focus on developing countries. Mark Zuckerberg says that Facebook Lite, its lightweight Android app for emerging markets, played a role in the increase in mobile users. During the earnings call, he also mentioned various efforts to expand connectivity in these countries, such as Aquila, its solar-powered internet-beaming drone.

This all contributes to around 200 million users added to the platform on a monthly basis. On the whole, Zuckerberg says that time spent per person on all Facebook products has also increased by double digit percentages. Aside from Facebook, the company’s other products have also seen record growth in the past few months. Messenger now has over a billion users, as does Whatsapp. Instagram, on the other hand, has over 500 million monthly users.

Though it didn’t give too many numbers on how video directly impacts its ad revenue, Zuckerberg also wanted to draw attention to how the company is focusing on video as well as Live. The Chewbacca Mask Lady clip for example, has now been viewed over 160 million times and Facebook Live has drawn quite a bit of press recently due to various current events such as the House sit-in and the Falcon Heights shooting. It plans on investing a lot more into video production and consumption in the coming months.

“We’re going to be video first,” says Zuckerberg. “We really believe that [in 5 years or so] most of the content that people consume online is going to be video.”

Source: Facebook

Jul

MIT’s ridesharing network is learning to dodge pedestrians

Lyft and Uber already operate in and around Boston, but students on MIT’s campus in Cambridge, MA also have a new, research-oriented option for on-demand ridesharing. Ford and MIT announced today a new project that will shuttle students around on both campus walkways and city streets in a fleet of electric shuttles — but the project isn’t just for helping lazy college kids get to class, it will also be conducting research on pedestrian traffic patterns that will help it optimize the service, as well as future generations of autonomous vehicles.

In the first phase of the Ford-MIT project, which launches publicly in September, students can hail rides in a electric vehicle small enough to navigate sidewalks without pushing out the rest of the foot traffic. Over the past five months, the research team has actually been gathering data on how pedestrians move around campus by using vehicles equipped with LiDAR sensors similar to those used in most current autonomous cars. By combining that data with outside information like class schedules, current weather conditions and even “the dynamic habits of students and professors across different semesters,” the team is able to anticipate where to route and position the vehicles during the day.

While this is all very helpful for creating an efficient ridesharing system, according to TechCrunch a secondary goal for Ford is to improve pedestrian detection in autonomous vehicle systems. With better LiDAR performance, self-driving cars should be able to rely on fewer cameras and potentially drive down costs while also getting better at navigating dense pedestrian zones. Eventually, the goal is to support Ford’s Smart Mobility program and replace human-driven employee or campus shuttles with fully autonomous ones. They’d better get their homework done soon though: in Amsterdam, the Mercedes FutureBus is already making driverless trips to the airport.

Jul

Major League Soccer deal lets you buy tickets on other websites

Sports leagues have historically clamped down on online ticket sales, in part to prevent the rampant scalping you see in much of the entertainment industry. Major League Soccer, however, is trying the exact opposite: it’s throwing things wide open. The league has forged a partnership with SeatGeek that will create a ticketing platform that works through virtually any website or app. Other sites could sell tickets, for a start. You could buy tickets from Uber before you hail a ride to that Seattle Sounders game, for instance.

This applies to resales, too. SeatGeek’s tech makes it possible to securely sell or transfer your ticket from other sites. Your fan club could set up a safe ticket exchange if it wanted. The biggest drawback may be the wait, as MLS is rolling out the new platform over the course of the coming year, starting with the league’s own sites.

MLS isn’t just being generous, of course — it has the motivation to loosen its grip on ticketing. As the organization acknowledges to Bloomberg, it’s small potatoes next to other US sporting leagues. It has both the “freedom” to experiment and a strong incentive to do whatever it takes to draw people in, including making it easier to snag tickets. Not that there’s much reason to complain. If the team-up works as promised, it’ll give you more chances to buy tickets on your own terms… or at least, it’ll help you offload tickets when you can’t make it.

Via: Bloomberg

Source: MLS Press Box

Jul

Pioneer VSX-831 review – CNET

The Good The Pioneer VSX-831 offers an excellent array of features for the price, including six HDMI ports, multiroom audio with Google Cast, and a phono input. The interface is thoroughly modern and easy to use. Sound quality is everything you’d want at the price.

The Bad Some of the promised streaming features are yet to be released. The receiver is not as accomplished for music playback as it is for home theater.

The Bottom Line The Pioneer VSX-831’s plethora of features, excellent ease-of-use and fine sound quality make it one of the better AV receivers for the money.

It’s been a period of adjustment for the Pioneer brand. Two years ago, Pioneer Japan announced it was selling its AV division to competitor Onkyo. This resulted in a number of changes, including the loss of speaker designer Andrew Jones to ELAC America.

The 2016 line of gear is the first that’s been fully assimilated into Onkyo, but the VSX-831 is still recognizably a Pioneer receiver. This “Ponkyo” offers audio features that the Onkyos at the same price don’t, including an upgraded digital converter (DAC) and internet streaming features.

Although its sound quality is very goo overall, like Pioneers of the past, the VSX-831 is voiced more towards movie playback than music. That’s not a bad thing, as it’s certainly capable of exciting home theater bombast, but if you are looking for a receiver with melodic chops then you may find that Sony’s STR-DN1070 (yes, Sony!) or Marantz’s NR1506 might suit you better.

On the other hand, both cost more than this well-priced Pioneer. The VSX-831 is available now for a list price of $449.99, £449.99 in the UK and AU$999 in Australia.