Ever since the NSA mass surveillance story first broke I’ve been reading a lot about spies and spy networks and spy operations and all that fun stuff. This has lead to a sudden urge to read spy novels, so I’ve started in on that too. I recently finished reading John Le Carré’s espionage novel The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. The heroes of spy novels are often characters like James Bond or Jason Bourne, superhuman men who are obviously good guys trying to stop obvious bad guys. Le Carré’s Alec Leamas is different though; the point of the novel is that ultimately Western and Soviet spy agencies were really not so different. [SPOILER in the next sentence] The Brits, for example, are willing to kill an honest, hard-working Soviet in order to protect their own crooked asset, and they’re willing to use questionable methods to do it. [end SPOILER] The point of the novel is not “the Soviet Union and Great Britain are completely indistinguishable” but rather “the so-called good guys often look a lot like the so-called bad guys”.
It’s been interesting reading The Spy Who Came In From The Cold during the Olympics, as a lot of Cold War sentiments directed at Russia have re-emerged. Some of this came to a head today when the Russian men’s hockey team was upset by the Finns. One of the things that I saw and heard in a number of places was a sense of moral triumph, that this was a fitting result for a country whose president has supported laws that seek to oppress and demean LGBT people. And of course there are Russia’s attacks on everyone’s favourite excuse to say an unprintable word, Pussy Riot. Just today people were enraged by reports that some members of Pussy Riot were physically assaulted by Russian security services. These things are awful, and it is right to say so, but to claim moral victory for Western culture in these cases seems to me to require extremely narrow vision. The recent history of Canada and the United States does not suggest a particularly strong moral high ground. You may find that statement hard to believe, but I think even a cursory look at our own history will reveal some extremely troubling similarities.
One of the major policy planks in the last Conservative election platform was to introduce income splitting for families with dependent children under 18. There are a bunch of reasons why I’m against this policy, but I think I can provide a quick demonstration of just how absurd an idea it is.
Imagine the following two families:
- A single parent who makes $75,000 a year. This parent has two children under 18.
- A married couple where one spouse makes $75,000 a year and the other is a stay-at-home parent to their two children under 18.
Looking at the chart in this op-ed by Andrew Coyne, we see that family 2 will gain $2,261 under the Conservative proposal. Family 1 will gain nothing.
So under the Conservative plan, not only will family 2 have a person who is dedicated full-time to raising their children, that family will do so with and additional $2,261 a year. In fact, because family 1 will almost certainly incur significant child care costs they’ll actually be far more than $2,261 a year behind family 2. Family 2, which already has a financial advantage is being given even more money despite not having any additional burdens relative to family 1. Family 2 is being given more for needing less. Isn’t that perverse?
While the NSA in the United States and GCHQ have come under a lot of scrutiny and criticism for their actions in terms of mass surveillance of their citizens, the role that CSEC (the Canadian equivalent) has played has been subject to significantly less attention. All three countries are part of an intelligence sharing program called Five Eyes that also includes Australia and New Zealand. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook or wherever else you may have noticed that I’ve spent a lot of time complaining that Canada’s role in the coalition had not been reported on nearly enough and that our intelligence services were surely involved in some of the misdeeds that the other spy organisations were taking part in.
A few details began trickling out last fall, but nothing like the broad public surveillance that had been revealed in the U.S. or Britain. Back in October it was reported that CSEC had hacked the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy but that was economic espionage, not mass surveillance. In late November the CBC reported that the NSA had “conduct[ed] widespread surveillance in Canada during the 2010 G8 and G20 summits” but the source document didn’t really back that assertion up. The document states that the NSA had assessed that there was no credible information that Islamic extremists were planning to attack the summits (the kind of legitimate work one might want a spy organisation to do) but said nothing that would indicate that there was mass surveillance of private citizens at or around the summits.
But over the past week or so we’ve finally started to learn about CSEC’s role in some of the more nefarious kinds of work that the other Five Eyes countries have been involved in. The Guardian reported that the NSA and GCHQ had a program to collect private info on the users of smartphone games like Angry Birds by taking advantage of the lax security evident in the ad networks that help fund many smartphone games. One thing that went unreported in every story that I saw about this program failed to notice a detail written in one of the slides that The Guardian published.
Bit of an intro here because, you know, I can’t pass up an opportunity to drone on about things. Back in October of 2013 a man named Tevis Thompson wrote a piece called “On Videogame Reviews” that was highly critical of Bioshock Infinite and of the lavish praise it received in the gaming press. The article makes a lot of good points, but one thing that I’ve been thinking about since then is his argument that a serious review system on a 10 point scale ought to have games fall everywhere along that spectrum, meaning it shouldn’t be uncommon to see 2s or 3s and average games should be 5s. It occurred to me that many movie reviewers do follow a system like this. Roger Ebert, for example, gave lots of 1 and 2 star reviews (his scale went to four). So I thought that as an experiment I would try rating all of the games that I played in 2013 in this manner.
I’ve started by treating an average game – that is, one that I enjoyed but didn’t stand out in any way – as a 5 out of 10. Good games would be 6s. Very good would be 7s. 9s would be rare and 10s would be reserved for only the greatest of experiences. Conversely, 4s would be games that were OK, 3s would be games I disliked, 2s would have major flaws, and 1s or zeroes would be virtually unplayable. Using this system, I came up with 6 games that seemed to fit in a list of “best of the year”, and I describe those games below. After discussing those 6 games I’ll post a list of all of the games I played in 2013 and how I would rate them. Assuming that I’ve been honest, the average should come out pretty close to 5 (possibly a bit higher since I tend to play games I know I’m more likely to enjoy).
This year was a really good year for music so I expanded my best-of list to 15. I left off some good albums here, but these are the ones I feel most strongly about recommending. I think music reviews generally are nonsense so I’m not going to bother trying to review these albums. I’m just going to say a few words about what I think about them and then link to a song that you should check out if you’re interested.
Here’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: the way we disguise the actors behind certain events by describing the organisation that they work for rather than the people themselves. This manifests most prominently, I think, in two places. The first is talking about government. We talk about “the government” as though it’s some sort of monolithic entity, but it’s actually a particular group of people who wield power in very specific ways. I am including both the political party currently in power and the civil service as “the government” here, which already highlights how the term can be problematic. The second place I frequently see this problem is discussing businesses. I’m going to stick with just businesses in this post for the sake of brevity, but I do intend to write about how this all applies to government in an additional post later.
Earlier this week I began my count-down of the top 25 games of this console generation (including contemporaneous PC games) by revealing my list of games 25 through 11. Today I’m back to finish it off with my top 10. The descriptions here are a little bit lengthier, and these are all fantastic games that I can recommend pretty much universally. Let’s get to it.
10. The Walking Dead
The Walking Dead game wasn’t one I was looking forward to. I’d heard very little about it at the time of its release and, while I enjoyed Telltale’s comedic adventure games like Sam & Max I didn’t pay much attention to their licensed film and TV properties. But listening to the hosts on the Weekend Confirmed podcast made it sound like a game I might really enjoy. A tense, story-driven experience in which the primary method of interaction was making plot and character relevant decisions? Cool. It definitely lived up to that, but it was also much more; a game that drove a deep emotional engagement to its characters primarily through its excellent writing and voice acting. The characters were well-drawn and didn’t fit into established archetypes, while the relationship between Lee and Clementine was as emotionally affecting as any I’ve experienced in games or any other medium. There are places where The Walking Dead falls short, such as its lack of any real challenge; I thought a few puzzles (previously Telltale’s specialty) would have really helped. But on the whole it charts out a unique experience and executes on that vision with precision.
With the release of the Xbox One and the Playstation 4 this month the current era of consoles is beginning to come to a close. While there will still be games released for the current generation consoles (Xbox 360 and Playstation 3) for some time yet, the dawn of a new console era seems to be as good a time as any to reflect back on the current one. To that end I’ve decided to rank the games I most enjoyed playing on the current console generation as well as PC games released during the same period. After putting together an initial list I whittled down my options to 25 of the best games I’ve played over the past several years.
I’m going to divide this into two posts in order to make it more readable. The first post will contain the first 15 entries, numbers 11 through 25. I’ll keep my write-ups here a bit shorter. In the case of games that are part of franchises I’ve either entered the entire series as one selection if I thought they were all great or picked one of the titles in the series if I thought it stood head and shoulders above the other(s). The only exception to that rule is EA’s NHL series, which I’ve played dozens, maybe even hundreds of hours of, but which I didn’t think fit on this list. Without further ado, let’s jump in at #25. (OK, slight ado: I’m not including any games released in 2013 here because I haven’t had enough time to reflect on them.)
U.N. Women recently started an ad campaign using Google’s autocomplete feature to demonstrate the pervasiveness of sexism worldwide. The campaign was covered in AdWeek, which is where I think most people first heard about it. It is undoubtedly true that sexism is a powerful force in pretty much every country on Earth and I think it is a moral imperative that we try to overturn that state of affairs. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that this particular instance means what people are making it out to mean. I think there’s good reason to be skeptical of what this campaign alleges.
I finished Grand Theft Auto V the other night, and I think the best word to describe how I felt was underwhelmed. The heist missions, which involve choosing an attack plan, doing a number of set-up missions (to acquire the right equipment, for example), and then pulling off the heist (swapping between the three characters, all performing different roles) were a lot of fun, but they make up a small portion of the game; I’d guess maybe 20-25% of it. Some of the other missions are fun, particularly a couple of the FIB missions that resemble heists and have you swapping all three characters in interesting scenarios.
But an awful lot of the game just feels flat and empty. A big part of that is because the setting is just too big. “The game world is [X] times the size of some other game world!” has become a selling point for a lot of games over the past few years, but I think GTA V shows what happens when the world gets too big, which is that it’s impossible to learn where anything is or how to get to it. I could navigate Vice City or the original San Andreas by landmarks, rarely needing to look at the mini-map except to determine if I was going in the right general direction. I suspect if I turned on Vice City today I could still find most of the major locations on the map. But even after playing for ~30 hours in GTA V I don’t know where anything is or how to get to it without using the mini-map’s GPS.
There’s plenty I could say about all sorts of aspects of the game, but instead I’m going to focus on one particular issue that really struck me. When Grand Theft Auto III came out it was a revelation. The idea of playing a game in a contiguous, consistent world that you could explore as you wanted to was truly impressive. The scale was remarkable. There was a sense of verisimilitude that few if any games had ever approached before. Vice City expanded on the ideas of GTA III to create a more cohesive, story-driven experience. San Andreas took those ideas to seemingly crazy lengths. And so, because these things about the games were so impressive, we forgave them for the fact that they often weren’t very good. “Oh yeah, the combat is awful” has always been a minor footnote in any review of the games, taking a back seat to the more technically impressive ambitions.
The problem for Grand Theft Auto now, and for me as a player of it, is that there are a lot of games now that do the things that made the Playstation 2 Grand Theft Autos so impressive, and many of those games also have excellent moment-to-moment gameplay. One of the biggest issues for me with GTA is that driving, which is still the activity that the player spends the most time doing, is not really very fun and has definitely become less so in more recent iterations. I used to be able to forgive the generally uninteresting driving because simply being able to travel anywhere I wanted in such a vast world was itself pretty exciting. But it’s not any more. Other open world games have made getting around a lot of fun, have even made them the centre of the experience. The parkour running in Assassin’s Creed, jumping from building to building is just way more fun than driving in GTA is. Flying around as Batman in the recent Arkham games is also a ton of fun. Riding a horse in Red Dead Redemption through a vast Wild West country side now feels exciting in a way that Grand Theft Auto used to. And even among open world driving games, I found the general handling of the cars in Sleeping Dogs to just be an awful lot more fun.
Beyond the locomotion there are other areas where open world games have simply passed GTA by. The combo based melee combat in the Batman games is a ton of fun, and Sleeping Dogs wisely aped it, mixing in more interactive enrivonments to create a better sense of place. And while the combat in the Assassin’s Creed games is still its weak point, it’s also an awful lot more fun than the combat in GTA is. And while I haven’t played the Saints Row games, I’ve heard that they’re now doing a better job of a lot of the things that GTA is known for too.
So what, at this point, is left to recommend Grand Theft Auto over a game like Assassin’s Creed or Batman? Well, the mission design at its best is still superior to just about any other open world game, as evidenced by the really fun heist missions. And the sheer scale of the thing, the insane budget that’s been dumped into it, the depth of detail in the world is second to none. But ultimately I think Grand Theft Auto has been surpassed by games that have learned its lessons and found ways to make the same kind of experience an awful lot more fun. A new Grand Theft Auto is still a major cultural event, but it’s no longer a major game.
