Gaming

The Fake 'War on Cops,' Pokémon GO, Bryan Cranston

July 13, 2016:

1. Data Shows That the 'War on Cops' is Fake (7 min)

2. Expressions of Hope From the Streets of Baltimore (6 min)

3. How Pokémon GO Became a Gaming Phenomenon (9 min)

4. Actor Bryan Cranston on His Creative Process (8 min) 

The Fake 'War on Cops,' Pokémon GO, Bryan Cranston

African Growth, the U.F.O. Candidate, A Dream Database

May 12. 2016: 

1. In Africa, a Celebration of Growth and Entrepreneurship (11 min)

2. Brazilian Senate Moves to Impeach President Dilma Rousseff (4 min)

3. Hillary Clinton Promises to Share Government Info on U.F.O.s (4 min)

4. Gaming App Helps Researchers Fight Dementia (7 min)

5. Inside a Massive Database of Dreams (7 min)

African Growth, the U.F.O. Candidate, A Dream Database

The Trolls Are Winning: GamerGate Case Will Not Go to Trial

Click on the audio player above to hear the full interview. 

In the battle over online harassment, it looks like the trolls are winning.

In the summer of 2014, Zoe Quinn, an online game developer and reviewer, went through a breakup with her boyfriend. He retaliated by publishing intimate details about her online. Mobs of internet users got involved and started to harass and threaten Quinn in an affair that has become known as "GamerGate."

Last year, Quinn filed a lawsuit to prevent her ex from commenting on the controversy and stirring up more harassment against her. But this week she asked the Massachusetts district attorney to withdraw the criminal case.

“I don't think the courts are ready to deal with this quite frankly,” Quinn told The Washington Post.

But Quinn’s experience is not unique. Brianna Wu, a game developer, journalist, and podcaster, was forced to leave her home in October 2014 after harassers published her address and made threats against her online.

“Zoe is kind of the spark that started this in the public consciousness, but she’s also part of a trend that had been happening to women in the gaming industry throughout most of 2014,” Wu says. “I had been speaking out and seeing some of my friends targeted, and eventually they went after me as well.”

In the last year and a half, Wu, CEO of the game development studio Giant Spacekat, says she has received over 200 death threats, adding that she gets rape threats “constantly.” However, she feels that the larger GamerGate movement goes beyond individuals, arguing that it is connected to the role of women in gaming.

“I think the average person can look at video games and understand that we have some extreme problems in the way that we represent women,” Wu says. “What has happened is, for the last 30 years, video games are perceived by a certain portion of gamers to be their club house. Now that the video game industry is changing, and we have a lot more women developers, women journalists, and women CEOs like me, that is very, very threatening to a certain portion of gamers.”

She adds: “Our crime is simply being a woman in this field and speaking to our lived experience, and asking the industry to do better.”

While most states have passed legislation to prevent cyber harassment, Danielle Citron, a professor of law at the University of Maryland, says the law often breaks down and fails to protect targets of online harassment.

“If you’re going to be convicted of harassment, the state’s got to prove that someone intentionally, repeatedly, [and] persistently targeted the person with speech that we can punish,” says Citron. “Some of the problem when you have a huge collective of people targeting a specific person is that it may be that any given person in the mob may contribute a little to the abuse, but not one person is responsible for persistent, targeted abuse.”

Taken together, a wave of online harassment from many different people can be intimidating and threatening. Yet, it presents a huge barrier for law enforcement looking to bring charges against any one individual.

“The law has great potential here, but as we’ve seen it’s a blunt instrument—sometimes it fails us,” says Citron. “What we saw in Zoe’s case, she gave up because it just became too much for her and her loved ones to bare.”

Citron, author of the book “Hate Crimes in Cyberspace,” says part of the problem lies in educ...

The Trolls Are Winning: GamerGate Case Will Not Go to Trial

Gamergate, Banning Bottles, Who Jesus Would Vote For

February 18, 2016: 1. War Worries Grow for GOP Convention | 2. What Would Jesus Do? South Carolina Evangelicals Eye GOP Candidates | 3. Fighting the Zika Virus on the Front Lines in Brazil | 4. A Small Town’s Advice for a Big City’s Plastic Water Bottle Ban | 5. The Next Flint? Toxic Water Crisis Hits Small Town in Upstate New York | 6. The Trolls Are Winning: Gamergate Case Will Not Go to Trial

Gamergate, Banning Bottles, Who Jesus Would Vote For

Play Like a Girl: Women Dominate USC Gaming Program

Click on the audio player above to hear the full interview.

For the second year in a row, the U.S. video game industry brought in more than $13 billion in sales in 2015, thanks in part to mostly violent and testosterone-driven games.

While shooting, sport, and fantasy games dominated the top 10 list this year, the University of Southern California is proving that gaming isn't an all-boys club anymore.

The school's game design program is bucking an industry trend: Women now outnumber men at both the graduate and undergraduate level. And they are enrolled not just because they love games, but because they hope to change the culture and demographics of gaming.

In the decade since since it began, Tracy Fullerton, a professor and the director of the USC Games program, has worked hard to make the once predominantly male-driven program more inclusive.

“If you look back to the earliest days of games, they were marketed to the entire family,” she says. “There really wasn’t a distinction—there wasn’t any sense that there was one segment of the market that was going to like computer games more than another. This notion that we have that games are only for young men really evolved to try to capitalize on a particular segment of the market.”

The USC Games program has been in place for a little more than a decade, and Fullerton says the university has worked hard to ensure that gender parity was front and center.

“We wanted to train to creative thought leaders, not just people who were going to go into the industry and get a job and be what I call ‘Butts in Seats,’ but to really think about the future of the entertainment industry and how interactivity and play fit into it,” she says. “We knew we had to change the culture in order to do that.”

One way to change the culture of the industry was to diversify production teams and foster a climate of inclusion, Fullerton says.

“It was something that we worked very hard to build, and I’m really gratified to see so many talented young women coming to our program to participate in that kind of environment,” she says.

Though Fullerton can appreciate adrenaline-packed shooting games (she’s a big fan of ‘Halo’), she’s also looking to be an innovative voice within the gaming world. And she’s doing that with one of her projects, entitled "Walden, The Game.”

“I started working on ‘Walden’ about eight years ago, and the core idea of this is that you play Henry David Thoreau, and you sort of follow in his footsteps,” she says.  

Fullerton says that the difficulty in creating this first-person game, which is a simulation of Thoreau’s life during his experiment in self-reliant living at Walden Pond, was translating the philosophy of the text with the feeling of being there.

Here’s how it was done, according to the ‘Walden’ game website: “The game begins in the summer of 1845 when Thoreau moved to the Pond and built his cabin there. Players follow in his footsteps, surviving in the woods by finding food and fuel and maintaining their shelter and clothing. At the same time, players are surrounded by the beauty of the woods and the Pond, which hold a promise of a sublime life beyond these basic needs.”

The concept, Fullerton says, provides a way to reach new people and bring them into the gaming experience.

“For me that’s the bottom line—if you have a more diverse team and you have a respectful process that listens to all those voices, then you’re going to reflect a more diverse viewpoint and your media is going to be attractive to a...

Play Like a Girl: Women Dominate USC Gaming Program