Hello, good afternoon, happy Friday. Last week the Oregon State Beavers beat the UO Ducks in their annual football game for the first time since 2016. Please click here for additional information.
I’ve been working a lot the last few months, and last month especially, so I’m hoping December will offer a bit of a reprieve. I really want to get the new quests system fully implemented on my Minecraft server, and of course I have no shortage of additional projects to keep working on once I get that fully deployed! But I’m also playing Clash again this weekend with my friends, and I’m really looking forward to it. We had a great few games last night! You can watch the games when I stream them on Twitch on Saturday and Sunday, if you want.
Oh and a bunch of my friends found out they passed the bar exam this week! I’m so proud of all of them! Also I still support diploma privilege and the bar exam sucks!
It’s in the game
Earlier this week I was tagged into a thread on Twitter about this article, which summarizes a recent complaint filed against EA in California federal court:
A new federal lawsuit asserts that Electronic Arts unlawfully increases its sports games’ difficulty in order to induce gamers into paying the video game publisher additional money.
In Zajonc v. Electronic Arts, a trio of California-based gamers—Jason Zajonc, Danyael Williams and Pranko Lozano—have sued EA for deceptive practices, false advertising and related claims under California law. Their case, which they hope becomes certified as a class action, concerns the 2017 to 2021 versions of Madden, FIFA and NHL. The trio is represented by, among others, California consumer rights attorney Jack Fitzgerald. EA has yet to answer the complaint in court, and has until early next year to do so.
The lawsuit contends that EA dupes many gamers through “utilizing one or more artificial intelligence technologies that adjust game difficulty dynamically.” EA, the plaintiffs charge, neglects to tell consumers about these technologies or their impact on games. Relying on “heuristic prediction and intervention to adaptively change the difficulty of matches, and influence or even dictate the outcomes,” EA keeps gamers “more engaged”—almost as if EA knowingly exploits an addiction.
But I don’t think the article really does the allegations justice. So here’s the complaint, and, if you’ll humor me, I’ll explain a little about the games, the players’ expectations, and why these allegations - if true - may have merit.
First, a little background. One person asked why “the game gets harder as you get stronger” doesn’t just describe every video game ever - why this isn’t just a complaint by the players that they’re not good enough at the game. That’s a reasonable question, but the specific facts at issue in this litigation are distinguishable from a regular gaming experience.
Most games use artificial intelligence in a way that creates difficulty that is approachable, not contrived. The enemies, or opposing team, or puzzles - they all use a set of rules that might result in dynamic situations the player has to adapt to, but the player is capable of adapting to those situations. There’s a fundamental agreement between the player and the developers that every challenge posed to the player can be ultimately overcome by a combination of character power and player skill, and while the circumstances may be dynamic, they nevertheless behave in broadly predictable patterns. An enemy has a certain set of behaviors and attacks that can be reacted to, countered, and taken advantage of. A puzzle has a solution that can be achieved in the given number of moves and responds to interactions in a consistent manner. In sports games, athletes are expected to perform at a level relative to their statistics shown in-game, and the physics engine is expected to mimic real-life interactions as closely as possible.
In most games, your character or your team gains power as you continue to play. It’s an incentive to keep playing, it rewards your effort in a way that makes your brain feel good, and it ultimately satisfies the fantasy of being more capable of achieving something in the game that you might not be able to out in the real world. But, increasingly, many games also let players spend real-world money in exchange for an immediate boost in power. You can skip a good chunk of grind by spending a good chunk of change if you think your time is more valuable than your money, or if you don’t care about the journey to becoming powerful and just want to get as much raw power as you can as quickly as you possibly can. For better or for worse, that is an increasingly common option offered in many games, and players generally understand that it’s a bargain offered by developers.
One of my favorite games, League of Legends, restricts monetization solely to cosmetic offerings like character skins (visual changes to the character model and abilities, sometimes with different voice and ability audio as well), in-game emotes, profile icons, and things of that nature. You can also spend money to unlock new characters to play as, but the developers constantly balance the game to ensure that every character in the game is within a reasonable power band of every other character - buying every character outright doesn’t give you an advantage over other players. And, like other games, you can also keep playing to earn currency that you can spend to unlock new characters for free. The idea of being able to spend money to get a power boost relative to another player would be fundamentally unthinkable. Even when certain champions are stronger than others and need to have their abilities tuned down a bit for balance purposes, their winrate still only hovers pretty close to 50%. Riot actually publishes large-scale data for the public to use, and there are plenty of websites that process and analyze this data to help players improve their skills and learn how the metagame changes over time.
Another of my favorite games, Genshin Impact, is a good example of a game that lets players spend money in exchange for power. Genshin Impact has become notorious for various YouTube videos of influencers spending hundreds of dollars on rolls for opportunities to unlock new characters, or to unlock extra abilities for characters they already own. The game becomes progressively more difficult as you keep playing it, and spending money will certainly let you get more power faster than someone who doesn’t spend money. But it’s not necessary to spend money to perform well and to tackle the harder difficulties. And, more importantly for the purposes of the complaint against EA, the increase in power is real, guaranteed, and tangible. Unlocking new characters and their more powerful abilities is an instant and extremely noticeable boost to your damage output or healing power, or even both. It makes the game a little easier, and it feels good, and it’s why players spend money. Not everyone likes that this is how the game is monetized, and the game’s monetization system has been criticized for being essentially a gambling system within a video game. But even if that’s the case, Genshin Impact is incredibly transparent about how everything in the game works, you know what you’re getting when you spend, and the results can be seen by the players and those they matchmake with.
EA games have an “Ultimate Team” game mode that involves players building a team of athletes with various skill levels and overall power ratings. This is a competitive mode; players construct their teams and play against each other. It’s like League of Legends in that there is a good amount of player skill involved; even though you can build a team of athletes that may be stronger statistically than your opponent, you might still lose a good 40% of your matches or more. (I haven’t checked any data on this and don’t know that it’s available, but just go with me here - the actual rates don’t really matter for the purposes of the complaint.) Unlike League of Legends, however, this competitive game mode lets players spend money on chances to unlock more powerful athletes faster than they would otherwise earn them - much like Genshin Impact. That’s fine, because everyone who chooses to play this game mode understands that it’s an option, and they choose to play it anyway. Players who don’t spend any money can still try to take down the high-spending whales if they want, and of course the whales can duke it out amongst themselves at the top of the leaderboards. What’s most important is that everyone gets the benefit of their bargain, that their expectations are satisfied about how their team performs in-game relative to the skill levels of the athletes they’ve acquired (whether by grinding or by spending).
The complaint against EA alleges that EA has fraudulently induced players to spend more money than they otherwise would by promising them power in exchange for spending, when in fact the spending does not achieve any actual power change. This might sound ridiculous on the face of it - the players admit that they did actually receive the athletes they wanted in exchange for spending money, after all. But EA isn’t just promising the athletes themselves; the athletes aren’t cosmetic skins like in League of Legends, they’re supposed to have higher relative power levels like in Genshin Impact. An athlete with a power level of 99 should be about 40% stronger than an athlete with a power level of 59. Maybe they should run faster, or be better at catching, or whatever. The complaint alleges that this isn’t actually what happens, and it’s not just by chance.
EA has a patent on a system called “dynamic difficulty adjustment.” They filed it in 2016 and it was granted in 2018. The system is designed to dynamically adjust the difficulty of the game the player is playing based on certain data that it analyzes about their habits, including spending.
The point of the system is to make the game easier or more difficult based on its assessment of the player’s skill, such that the player neither grows bored nor frustrated. EA supposedly wants its games to be fun - but really it wants players to keep playing its games (and to keep spending money on them).
The complaint alleges that EA is using this DDA system even in its competitive matchmade games to affect the relative power level of the teams composed by players, depriving the players of the benefit of their spending (or grinding, but you can’t sue a game developer for time lost to grinding). It’s not just that the game gets harder as players play more - it’s that EA is allegedly putting its hand on the scale and breaking the rules it supposedly agreed to about athletes’ relative power levels. It’s one thing to have the game get progressively more difficult regardless of whether the player spends money, such that there’s an incentive to spend money to make it faster to overcome the difficulty. It’s another thing entirely to scale up the difficulty relative to the power gained by spending in a way that defeats the point of spending entirely. That might seem like a distinction without a difference, but it really matters!
It also matters because EA games are expected by their players to be, fundamentally, simulations of real-world interactions. If one athlete is higher-skilled than another, both players expect the higher-skill athlete to win. It provides an incentive for the high spender to keep spending, and for the free-to-play grinder to keep grinding, or to otherwise overcome the spender by some mix of skill and ingenuity. What the complaint alleges is that EA is using its patented system to dynamically decrease the skills of the athletes on spenders’ teams, such that they’re no better than the athletes of players who haven’t spent any money. That strikes me as a plausible fraud claim!
I mentioned that Riot publishes its data above. Because EA games are competitive multiplayer games, you could expect that - like League of Legends - even a skilled player only wins a certain number of their matches. Most matchmaking systems try to keep that number at about 50% - if your winrate is higher than that, you get matched against higher-skill players until it evens out, and if it’s lower, you get matched against lower-skill players. But Riot doesn’t just track winrate data - it tracks just about everything that happens in each individual match, and it occasionally aggregates and publishes that data in its own reports about how certain characters are performing. EA likely has access to its own dataset of this nature. And in fact I’m almost certain it does, because that kind of data is what would be needed to power DDA’s algorithm in the first place.
Because certain athletes are supposed to have higher power levels than others, you would expect the data to bear out those differences in aggregate data both about team winrates and individual athlete performance across all recorded games. If EA is using DDA to nullify the power differences of athletes in matchmade games, the statistics for individual athletes will be much closer than their expected differences based on power differentials. It’s totally plausible that statistical analysis could easily reveal whether the plaintiffs’ claims have any merit.
The major point here is that the athlete stats and power levels should matter in a game where everyone agrees in advance that they should. EA should be bound by the rules it sets out before players agree to spend money on its games, or even to play them at all. While some players view pay-to-win models as unfair and refuse to engage with them, what’s truly unfair is selling a promise of power and not following through on it.
Unfortunately, this case is almost certainly bound to be dismissed by the judge and sent to arbitration, where the proceedings and any results thereof will be both strictly confidential and non-precedential. And that’s too bad, because EA’s players deserve honesty about the games they’re playing. Whether players choose to spend their money for power or cosmetics, they’re entitled to the fair value of the bargain they made with the developers - and nothing less. We’ll just have to see whether EA thinks it needs to dynamically adjust the difficulty based on its litigation team.
Hotter than hell
If you haven’t played Hades yet, I strongly recommend it. If you have, you’ve perhaps found that the voice acting in the game is… attractive. And you’re not alone:
In 2011, Jennifer Hale, the Guinness World Record holder for most prolific video game voice actress, said in a New Yorker profile that her job is “to not exist.” That may have been true 9 years ago. But the normalization of fan culture, plus the meteoric rise of social media, means that everyone gets drawn into the fan conversation. It’s hard to stay out, even if the only thing you’ve contributed to a work is your voice.
When the trailer for Supergiant Games’ latest title, Hades, debuted on August 18th, Avalon Penrose was not paying attention to her social media. The actress, who voiced the antagonist-turned-love-interest Megaera, had deleted her Facebook and Twitter accounts in July. “I was in such a spiral of not enjoying social media,” Penrose said, “because of the politics I was fighting over.” Then the trailer hit, and Penrose started noticing a trickle of Hades-related comments on her Instagram. “I was like, should I have Twitter again?” she said. Penrose got a new Twitter account and began engaging with a few fans who reached out to her directly about her performance.
On September 17th, Hades 1.0 dropped. The game, a roguelike that tells the story of Greek god Zagreus, son of Hades, and his attempts to escape the Underworld, had been in early access since December of 2018. Upon its official release, Hades received dazzling reviews and sold over 300,000 copies in three days. It climbed sales charts on Steam and the Nintendo Switch. Enthusiastic fans, who responded to the game’s complex and fully-voiced characters, began a deluge of art, chatter, and fanfiction. Two and a half months later, that deluge has hardly slowed.
I don’t think we get enough stories about what fandom is like from the side of the performers. This is really interesting.
Vaccines work
First, a shot. I know this, you know this, all reasonable people know this. And yet:
Ben’s suspicions are almost certainly correct. As he notes in a reply to that tweet, his colleague Brandy Zadrozny has written quite a bit about the spread of misinformation through social media:
Research from a forthcoming paper from Johnson and his team, currently in review for publication, shows members of communities previously considered unrelated or “undecided” on vaccines — groups for pet lovers, parent school groups, yoga fans and foodies, for instance — are increasingly connecting with the anti-vaccination movement.
“It’s like a tumor growth,” Johnson said.
While the anti-vaccination activists’ favored platform, Facebook, has taken a number of steps recently to limit the reach of anti-vaccine content, the movement has thrived during the pandemic — a success largely due to a pivot toward Covid-19 misinformation and a communication strategy that’s allowed the anti-vaccination message to circumvent platforms’ policy enforcement and reach users outside its network.
You may also remember this story of Brandy’s that I linked in February. It’s really fucking bad. There’s no clear path to making things better. Hopefully Facebook’s new deplatforming efforts will help, but there are serious and legitimate concerns that these conspiracies are already both too broad and too deeply-rooted to deprogram people who are already bought into them.
However, here’s your chaser:
Ashley Locke, 29, got her first injection this month as part of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine trial.
Since she started the trial Nov. 16 in Nashville, Tennessee, millions of people have watched as she documented her experience on TikTok.
"I've seen people post TikToks about different journeys they're having, like weight-loss journeys or moving to a new school and things like that, so I was, like, this vaccine trial is an interesting thing. I'll post about that," Locke said. "Maybe some people will find that interesting."
The post has amassed about 2.7 million views, and she has been inundated with questions and comments about the vaccine trial.
An emerging group of TikTokers have gone viral for sharing information about the Covid-19 vaccines. Hashtags about the vaccine have millions of views as young people seek information about the trials in a format they can understand. Several other TikTok users have posted videos of themselves participating in trials, and at least one video, in which a doctor weighs the differences among some of the vaccine trials, has received more than a million views.
One hashtag, #CovidVaccine, has more than 36 million views.
It’s commonly said that the best solution to bad speech is more speech. I’m not sure whether that’s a sufficient solution when the speech at issue is a dangerous mind-virus that detaches people from reality, but at least there is a concerted effort to provide accurate information about the vaccines - and it seems to be working. There’s at least a little bit to be hopeful about.
Is this securities fraud?
Again, yes:
Sen. Kelly Loeffler, the ultra-wealthy unelected Georgia senator facing a runoff election this January that may determine control of the U.S. Senate, came under the scrutiny of government and Senate investigators this spring amid press reports of stock trades made after she attended a private briefing in January about the coronavirus pandemic.
Loeffler argued that she and her husband, Jeffrey Sprecher, chair of the New York Stock Exchange, had complied with insider trading rules, which require executives of publicly traded companies to wall themselves off from market transactions by setting up a pre-planned investment schedule executed by a third-party broker.
The Republican-led Senate and the Department of Justice both investigated the trades, but both probes were later dropped. It is still unclear, however, what came of a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation. The Loeffler campaign released an ad this spring, called "Cleared," which claimed that the "fake news" had "lied" about her trades.
But the broader context of Loeffler and Sprecher's transaction history over the last several years shows that they made a number of significant changes to their pre-scheduled trading plan this year. Those revisions included Sprecher quadrupling sales of stock in his company, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange and one of the most influential financial institutions in the world.
Clap harder if you want Tinkerbell to live
Loyal readers of this newsletter have probably figured out by now that I find profiles of right-wing grifters absolutely fascinating. I think it’s necessary to understand these people in order to devise ways to counterprogram against them, and to save friends and relatives from their absurd universe of lies and bullshit. But, also, they’re just fundamentally broken people, and something in me wants to understand how a person gets to be that way. Which is why I was especially intrigued to see the New York Times publish a piece on Newsmax founder Chris Ruddy this week:
I asked an amused former Clinton aide to dredge this correspondence out of an old box because Mr. Ruddy, a Long Island-born 55-year-old, has emerged as the most audacious media entrepreneur of the Trump election fantasy. The chief executive of Newsmax and part of President Trump’s South Florida social circle, Mr. Ruddy has capitalized on the anger of Mr. Trump’s supporters at Fox News for delivering the unwelcome news, first in Arizona and then nationally, that Mr. Trump had lost his re-election campaign. On Newsmax, however, the fight is still on, the imaginary election-altering Kraken is yet to be released, Mr. Trump is striving valiantly for four more years and the ratings are incredible.
Newsmax’s prime-time ratings, which averaged 58,000 before Election Day, soared to 1.1 million afterward for its top shows, with one host, Greg Kelly, cheerleading on Twitter and on the air for “the QUEST TO COUNT all the LEGAL VOTES.” The ratings even drew a congratulatory call from Mr. Trump himself, my colleagues Michael Grynbaum and John Koblin reported last week.
But Mr. Ruddy, as those Clinton messages show, is not the sort of true-believing ideologue his viewers may imagine in the foxhole alongside them. He is, rather, perhaps the purest embodiment of another classic television type, the revenue-minded cynic for whom the substance of programming is just a path to money and power.
All successful TV programmers have some mercenary in them, of course, but even by those standards, Mr. Ruddy is extreme. He has turned Newsmax into a pure vehicle for Trumpism, attacking Fox News from the right for including occasional dissenting voices. And when Trumpism turned this month from an electoral strategy into a hallucinatory attempt to overturn the election, Mr. Ruddy saw opportunity: Newsmax, available on cable in most American households and streaming online, became the home of alternate reality.
There is so much going on here.
Timshel
There is little that speaks to me more strongly than stories of this nature:
Lately, Sam Jacobs has been having a lot of conversations with his family’s lawyers. He’s trying to gain access to more of his $30 million trust fund. At 25, he’s hit the age when many heirs can blow their money on harebrained businesses or a stable of sports cars. He doesn’t want to do that, but by wealth management standards, his plan is just as bad. He wants to give it all away.
“I want to build a world where someone like me, a young person who controls tens of millions of dollars, is impossible,” he said.
A socialist since college, Mr. Jacobs sees his family’s “extreme, plutocratic wealth” as both a moral and economic failure. He wants to put his inheritance toward ending capitalism, and by that he means using his money to undo systems that accumulate money for those at the top, and that have played a large role in widening economic and racial inequality.
The sins of the mothers and the sins of the fathers need not be the sins of the sons and the daughters.
You deserve some good animal content
Have a good weekend.