Random Thoughts, May 2015 edition: Futurama, dissertations, informed consent in fantasy, and match 3 games

This is going to be a combination of updates, and things that have occurred to me.

* "Not sure if _____ or ______"
"You're _____ is bad, and you should feel bad!"
"I don't want to live on this planet anymore."
"__________ do not work that way!
"I'll make my own ___________! With blackjack, and hookers!

Not an original observation, but Futurama's clearly going to be more remembered as a meme generator than a TV show. There's a Buzzfeed article in there, somewhere."
Just posted this on Facebook. I don't really feel like fleshing it out too much further at the moment, but it's an interesting issue.Arguably, Futurama has had more cultural value as a source of memes than as a TV show. That probably still holds if you talk financial value too--but only if you factor in the ad revenue generated by the hundreds and thousands of sites that have deployed variations of these memes to get clicks. It's not money that's going to the show creators. Then again--who creates a meme? Its original coiners, or its major circulators? If I ever have a spare couple of days, it's a new media area I'd like to delve into more fully.

*The dissertation's reaching a boiling point. My defense is projected for September--though I've only got permission for one more term of grad school, so that's a fun future hurdle--and I'm still coping with the notion of what comes next. I should be applying for things and submitting other things like crazy but... I'm not there yet. It might be the same sort of procrastination that led to the degree delays to begin with, but I feel like something still needs to click. Soon, hopefully.

*Speaking of clicking, I've been reading Rachel Aaron's The Legend of Eli Monpress. I'll probably have a full review somewhere at some point, but an idea in regards to the series popped into my head today, and I want to preserve it. The magic system in the novel is essentially the animus version, with a genie twist. That is, every object in the fantasy world--manmade or natural--if it's of sufficient size, is inhabited by a lifeforce, a sentient spirit. Wizards can communicate with the spirit, and bind it to them and make it serve them, ala the genie/master relationship. So far, so good. But what Aaron adds to the concept that really makes it interesting is the idea that the current dominant group of wizards, the spiritualists, believe that it's unethical to bind a spirit against its will. The only spirits you can call on as servant, then, are the ones that you enter into a willing relationship with, where both parties supply the other with what they need, and both may break it off, if they wish. In short, it's a fantasy universe where magic is based on the idea of informed consent.  That's kind of amazing, and makes the series really relevant in terms of greater cultural issues. Yes, there's a huge difference between consent as relates to sexuality and as it relates to magical spirits, but framing the relationship in terms of ethics and moral responsibility over personal desire creates some really interesting parallels.

*I gave a talk this week based on the third chapter of my dissertation. I got some good feedback on it, but in a lot of ways, it's the wrong point in the dissertation process to be soliciting feedback from outside of my committee. I'm really glad I did it, and I understand my own argument and how it's perceived a lot better now, but it would have been better to have pursued this sort of thing earlier. At that point of writing, I was too caught up in the idea that I couldn't put anything out there until I had my committee's seal of approval; more experimentation could have been helpful. That's something to remember.

*Conversation overheard on the bus today: "When I was a kid, I used to read while I walked around, with my nose in a book." "Me too! It really bugged my mom. She thought I'd walk into a tree, or something."
Me, in my head: "I AM ONE OF YOU."

*This weekend is all about prepping for the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, and writing the paper for the Canadian Game Studies Association. I've got some draft notes, but it's time to flesh them out. If I was a better planner, it'd be a presentation on dissertation-related material, or even a revised version of this week's talk. Instead, it'll be a look at the cultural, economic, and design-related issues involving Match-3 type games. Basically, it's a chance to take some of things I've said  about Match-3 games and put them before a larger audience. I'm thinking five minutes on the social and economic aspects of Match-3 games in general, five minutes on how some of them incorporate narrative skins, and five minutes on how Marvel Puzzle Quest in particular approaches these issues.  If anyone's interested, I might put the piece up here when it's done.

Later Days. 

Devil Off My Back: How I Stopped Competing in Marvel Puzzle Quest

There were a few of demands on my time the last semester, mostly ill-advised, self-imposed ones. First and foremost, I sank an ungodly amount of time into my new course, on forms of fantasy. I can't really regret the time I spent on it, though, as it was by far the most I've enjoyed researching or teaching in ages. It's really the first time I've been teaching a course where both my students and I were interested in the material; I really hope I can channel that interest into future projects.

Speaking of future projects, there's the dissertation (which is really an ongoing project. This segue is not the best). It's been progressing, though rather slowly--I found some vital research I needed on a journal  that's only in French, which has meant slow going. And there's the aforementioned course I was teaching--I tallied up all the notes I took for the fantasy course, and it wound up being 200 pages.That length is about 4/5 of a dissertation right there. Again, I'm hoping to do better next term, but since I'll be teaching two courses--Introduction to Rhetoric and Forms of Science-Fiction--that's going to take some focus on my part.

Luckily, I just had some of my distractions removed from me. Remember my glowing reports of Marvel Puzzle Quest, the freemium, superhero version of Candy Crush? Well, I finally have that devil off my back. Or, to be more accurate, the devil climbed off my back, told me it was time to see other people, and walked away, whistling a jaunty tune. But it's the end result that matters, right?

What happened involves another facet of Marvel Puzzle Quest I don't think I've described much until now. A player of MPQ competes against special battles or other players' rosters; either way, she accumulates points, and moves up and down the ranks depending on how many points everyone else in her bracket has as well. And at the end of a set period of time, rewards are handed out based on ranking. There's an individual tally of points, but there's also a group tally--you can join an group, or an "alliance," and then the points a player accumulates go to her individual tally, but also her alliance tally, and one can get additional rewards based on the alliance tally as well.

What players can do for each other is limited; there's a chat function, and there's the option to send your characters out to help someone else. But mostly, the only purpose of the alliance is to work together towards that alliance tally reward. As such, anyone who isn't scoring high on the individual level and seems to be latching on in order to get the alliance reward is seen as deadweight. (You can probably see where this is going already.) And a cycle of top tier and lower tier players develops in the game overall--the best players and alliances win a bracket and get the best rewards, which allows them to perform better in the next competition. The losers don't get worse, but they don't get to improve either. The gap can be met somewhat through a willingness to spend real money on the game for better characters, but mostly that willingness exacerbates the gap rather than closes it, as it's the top tier players who seem most willing to shell out money to stay in their positions. There's two things (probably more, but two that occur to me right now) that can change this dynamic: the developers slowing down on the characters they release or doing something to increase the likelihood of drawing good characters for low level players, and the players' chief resource, time, becoming scarce. Both are unlikely; it's the top tier players who tend to invest the most time (understandably, since they get the most reward and motivation) and it's also the top tier players who, as I learned, pay the most cash.

And this is where I came in, or rather, fell out. I was doing fairly well on the player versus player side of things, but that was largely because I was taking advantage of my open schedule to select brackets with very unfavorable end times. (Play until my bracket ends at 4 am? It... seemed like a good idea at the time? Well, it kind of did.) And thus, I maximized my own time potential. But I did *not* have time to play through the player versus environment matches multiple times a day, especially given that my characters aren't really developed enough for it. As my individual rank dropped below my alliance's rank, the writing was on the wall. The real eye-opener moment was when someone asked in chat how much everyone involved has paid for the game. I have never spent a cent on Marvel Puzzle Quest; while you can pay to advance faster, or at least for the chance to advance faster, I stuck to my slow, plodding way. My teammates, however, were not so restrained. The *minimum* amount they spent was $150. It was fairly clear at that point that we had very different notions on what we wanted to get out of this game.

So this morning, one of the alliance's leaders kicked me out. There was no warning, no "time to shape up or you're dropped"--just a notification that I'm no longer aligned with anyone. I can't blame them for it; I can't even look up who they replaced me with, since I don't remember the name of the alliance to begin with, which suggests my commitment was never really that firm, despite the time I was sinking into playing.

I haven't looked for a new alliance, but I haven't deleted the app either. I think I'll keep playing the game--it's a good filler for when watching junky TV--but at the same time, I think I'm going to fall back from the competitive side of it. It's an investment I'm not willing to make financially, and shouldn't have been making in terms of time. I'll probably miss it, but if you can look at your time in a game and say after that it should have been spent elsewhere, you're probably right.It was an interesting experience; I've always said that my personality precludes any serious investment in MMO-type games, but through the magic of MPQ, I've inadvertently gotten at least a small taste of the competitiveness and serious time commitment involved in multiplayer affairs. I have to say, I prefer games with clear, unambiguous endings much better--I need that "stopping point."

MPQ has also taken down some of the barriers in my mind about the difference between casual and hardcore players. I know intellectually they're terms that have no reality behind them, but MPQ really blows them away. At its core, it's a "casual" game--a match three tile based on Bejeweled. But because of the competitive aspects added to monetize it, it is also a game requiring a very, very high level of commitment in order to excel.

The numbers my former fellow players reported spending on it are interesting too. Popular industry wisdom and consumer reports claim that most freemium titles are supported by "whales"--that is, 0.15% of all freemium players account for over 50% of its revenue. So you have many players, but only a few who pay enough to keep the lights on (it's similar to the porn industry that way). My teammates belie that number, paying enough to be significant, but not enough to land in the whale category. Now, one anecdotal result doesn't contradict a million sample size survey. But it's fun to speculate. Does MPQ attract a different audience through its focus on superheroes and competition? Did I wind up in an atypically large spending group? Is the 0.15% number wrong?

I don't know. Can't know, really. But I appreciate the opportunity to watch things unfold from the sidelines, instead of in prime freemium seats.

Later Days.

Fearless Defenders Covers: More Comics! Because, why not?

This month saw the cancellation of Cullen Bunn and Will Sliney's "Fearless Defenders," proving once again that we can't have nice things. The idea of the series was that Valkyrie was charged by the All-Mother of Asgard (the lady triumvirate that currently rules the place, because let's face it, Odin is pretty terrible at it) to form a new band of Shield Maidens. Valkyrie's reluctance to select contemporary female heroes to do that led to a power vacuum that was filled by other nasty warriors, and she was slowly putting together a team not of shield maidens but of fearless defenders to protect people; as of the cancellation, the ranks included Annabelle Riggs (super genius, unpowered, body merged with Valkyrie's through some weird doings); Misty Knight (bionic private eye), Dani Moonstar (sometimes X-Man); Hippolyta (Marvel's more war-oriented version of Wonder Woman, with the serial numbers field off); Clea (sorceress and frequent paramour of Stephen Strange); Elsa Bloodstone (British, monster hunter, probably best known for her role in Ellis' NextWave); and Ren (Inhuman, whose powers... um... I forget. She's new).

Besides the female-positive cast, the book was... good, usually solid fun, edging towards great, but never quite reaching it, to be honest. I would have preferred a little more character and a little less nonstop action, although I can certainly see how the virtue of the superhero comic is generally that it does it the other way around. But what was great was the covers of the series, drawn by Mark Brooks. Especially towards the end of the run, they were pretty amazing deconstructions of gender and power in various media forms, a perfect purified version of what the series was aspiring to. But I haven't seen anywhere where all of the covers are collected, so I thought I might as well do the honors. In order then, without further ado, I present the covers of Fearless Defenders.

Issue #1

So far, so generic, though it's nice that each hero is facing the other's regular villain type.

Scottie Young drawn variant cover, which is roughly the same action, but everyone is adorable.

Manara variant, which goes for a pin-up cover-type approach--

A little too much cheesecake, I think.

Deodato variant. ...My, that's a big gun.

Issue #2

Here's where things start to get interesting. It's a very simple idea for a cover, but it works really well. And it starts a transmedia theme that's going to come up a lot.

Martin's variant cover. I like the way the blue and orange juxtapose.

Issue #3

Back tattoo title. Nice way of establishing Hippolyta's style, and putting her at odds with the existing team.

Jiminez variant. I believe this makes the Wonder Woman analog fairly obvious.

Fearless Defenders #4

This one got a lot of attention when it came out. It has the paper doll play aspect, which is generally a feminized activity, but by virtue of being a comic book cover, and featuring a comic book character, it also says something about how comic book creators and fans "dress up" their (female) characters.

Fearless Defenders AU #4

I'm not sure this one counts, to be honest, as it it's a Jiminez cover and was part of the tie-in to the Age of Ultron series, not this series proper. But I do like the way Wolverine, Hulk, and Captain America look sort of dumbfounded at Hippolyta's beheading.

Fearless Defenders #5

Cover as Street Fighter-esque fighting game, illustrating another way that we play with our superheroes. And illustrating the roster of characters that were felt to fall under the title's mandate, though not all of them ever appeared in its pages proper.

Amanda Conner variant. It's a little more generic (the team pose) but it also shows the variety of Defenders the book could potentially feature.

This, on the other hand, shows no members of the series at all, in order to participate in the "Wolverine Through the Ages" cover series, a bunch of alternative covers that have nothing to do with the comics, but do feature Wolverine from various points in Marvel past, present, and future. Well done, Marvel. You have taken your all-female comic, removed the title characters, and replaced them with your best-selling male character. Very on the nose.

Fearless Defenders #6

Recasting the superhero cover in the genre of the 50s horror comic. Undead Norse vikings lend themselves well to that sort of thing.

Fearless Defenders #7

I think there's a reversal of the manual labor = men stereotype, though we've also got the medium-displacement joke (comic book cover as billboard) and the displacement of labor (superheroes in costumes wearing uniforms for manual labor).

Fearless Defenders #8

Cover as sketchpad, and one that's definitely emphasizing the female form. The pencils are eraser are a nice touch.

Fearless Defenders #9

Another example of re-appropriating a genre that's highly charged when it comes to female depictions: manga. The bottom has Dani Moonstar saying "Okay, now we're just pandering," in part to show the reader, yes, we realize what we're doing here.

Fearless Defenders 10

Another media appropriation, this time the hip-hop album cover. Makes a nice introduction to the new character too.

Fearless Defenders 11

Soviet-esque poster. Kind of surprised that they didn't put Natasha in the front here, although any chance that avoids stereotyping a character who is already "Russian spy" is probably a good idea.

Fearless Defenders 12

And here we have the end of the line, as the train pulls into the cancellation station. This is probably best of the bunch: a pastiche of the romance novel covers, and maybe the only one that can credibly claim to be inverting heteronormative tropes as well as gender tropes. I also like that it's Riggs that's holding Valkyrie, as it demonstrates how their roles in relation to each other have changed over the course of the series.

So... what have we learned? Well, variant covers aren't all they're cracked up to be; with all due respect to the artists' skills, most of them fail to hit the same height as the original. And that's no surprise; you've got a regular person who's connected to the entire series, compared to someone who's just in to do a single issue, then the regular artist should be able to connect better to the series' theme; otherwise, they probably shouldn't be the regular artist. Moreover, we've got a pretty powerful case that the comic book cover can and should be used better than it is. The covers here generally don't connect to the events of the book, but they do illustrate the characters we should be paying attention to, and do a great job of presenting visually the themes that the book wants to claim as its own. That's so much more than a generic pose or random action shot that the typical cover conveys. And it really explores what the cover is allowed to do, as a type and medium. I don't think I've ever become a fan of an artist before just for their cover designs, but I will look out for whatever Mark Brooks does next.

Friday Quotations: DOOOOOM

From the opening pages of Doom 2009 #1.  I was just really in the mood for a guy who builds himself a metal suit, and then says, you know what would look good over this? Green skirt and cloak.  And damn it if he isn't right.

Later Days.

Breaking News: Disney Buys Marvel

This will be a quick post: according to venerable news sources, Disney has just announced it's bought Marvel Comics for around $4 billion. As a dedicated comic reader, a lot of issues jumped to my mind: with DC owned by Warner Bros, this means that both of the two major comic publishers receive their marching orders from larger multimedia figures. Will Disney be insisting on some creative changes to bring Marvel characters more in line its other set? Will this deal have an effect on the rise in comic book prices? Will this have an actual, measurable change on the quality of the comics themselves, in the long or short term?

Well, to be honest, these questions were not the first thing to come to my mind. The first question was:
How long do I have to wait before I can go to Disneyworld and get my picture taken with Donald Duck and Wolverine at the same time?

Later Days.