In the never-ending quest to milk George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” franchise for every last piece of Lannister gold, enterprising developers have turned to another medium: Facebook. Via Kate Cox of Kotaku:

“Game of Thrones Ascent will take place in HBO’s version of George R.R. Martin’s sprawling fantasy world. Developer Disruptor Beam plans for the game to focus on the spirit of backstabbing political wheeling and dealing that forms so much of the backbone of the series, by using Facebook’s social connections to let players forge critical alliances. Players take on the role of petty nobles in the Seven Kingdoms, who ‘claim their birthright by choosing which of the great houses they’ll swear allegiance to, securing their holdings, developing their lands and personal reputation, and assigning sworn swords to quests.’”

In the wake of the HBO series’ breakout success, there have alreadybeen several botched attempts to produce a Game of Thrones video game. I’m not much of a gamer these days, but I am a noted sucker for video game tie-ins based on my favorite TV shows; in my younger years, I was fan enough of both The Sopranos and Lost to play their awful, wholly unnecessary video game adaptations to completion.

Game of Thrones is the latest series to draw the attention of game developers. Last year, developer Cyanide released A Game of Thrones: Genesis, a bland real-time strategy game set centuries before the events of the series that used the Game of Thrones setting as the barest of window dressing (masochists can but the game on Amazon for $5). Though A Game of Thrones: Genesis was poorly received, Cyanide got another crack at the series with last week’s new release Game of Thrones, an action RPG that features voicework from several of the HBO series’ actors and a Stan Lee-esque cameo by George R.R. Martin. While both Game of Thrones and its reviews are more impressive than its real-time strategy predecessor – and it includes quests with options that at least attempt to offer some nuance – it’s clearly nothing on the level of, say, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, or even Mass Effect 3.

Why is it so hard to make a video game of Thrones? It’s certainly easy to see why video game developers would be drawn to the Game of Thrones universe: there’s already a large, passionate built-in fanbase, and many of the all-time best video games are set in worlds full of swords and sorcery. But any Game of Thrones adaptation that starts with fighting has already missed the point. We’ve seen how far fighting gets you in Westeros – just ask Khal Drogo or Ned Stark. A Game of Thrones game that invites the player to cut through swaths of cookie-cutter enemies undercuts one of Game of Thrones’ central themes: every death matters, and every killer is risking their life by doing the killing.

The real survivors in Westeros are characters like Tyrion, Varys, or Littlefinger, who have largely shunned swords in favor of politics. That’s the experience that a Game of Thrones game should attempt to replicate, and that’s why Game of Thrones Ascent is the first adaptation of “A Song of Ice and Fire” that has piqued my interest. I’m inherently skeptical of all Facebook games – once Farmvilled, twice shy – but it seems to me that Disruptor Beam’s concept cleverly uses the complex, amorphous social network of our actual lives to replicate the complex, amorphous social network of Westeros. That’s what Game of Thrones does best, and that’s what a video game of Thrones should do, too.

This post contains spoilers through the May 20 episode of Game of Thrones.

“The Prince of Winterfell” may be a lot of plot setup, but it’s also an episode that illustrates one of the things I love about the scope of Game of Thrones: it’s a big enough world that when coincidences happen and surprising combinations of people come together, they can feel even more miraculous than dragons or white walkers. But that space also means that people can forge different paths than the ones reserved for them by their station and gender.

Brienne of Tarth’s made those choices again and again throughout her life, whether she’s choosing knighthood over the life of a nobly bred lady or loyalty to Catelyn over a conventional oath of fealty to a leige lord. But in this episode, her choices are juxtaposed particularly sharply with those of her inverse, Jamie Lannister. Jamie is a man, and not just any man—”Do you remember Jamie at 17?” Tyrion asks in reflective wonder, considering his talented older brother—but a preternaturally gifted specimen of manhood. He was born to the knighthood Brienne has to fight every day to claim for her own, and instead of upholding the code she worships, he’s spattered it with gore. As they go on the run together, Jamie may enjoy taunting Brienne, asking her first “Have you known many men? I suppose not. Women? Horses?” and then “Has anyone ever told you you are as boring as you are ugly?” But he’s losing the very battle he thinks he’s goading Brienne into. “All my life, men like you have sneered at me,” she tells him. “And all my life, I’ve knocked men like you into the dust.” Jamie may never have the struggles with his gender and vocation that Brienne suffers every day, but she’s vastly more secure in the knighthood she chose than Jamie ever was in the white cloak that suffocated him.

Then, there’s Talisia, who was “raised to be a proper little lady.” She explains to Robb, in a speech that newcomers to the series should remember very, very carefully (along with another important bit of foreshadowing)* how she came to transcend her own state:

When I was 12, my mother and father went to a wedding. Weddings in Volantis last for days…we couldn’t bear to be inside…every child in Volantis was in the bay that day…Drummers were playing for coppers in the east bank. I was treading water, talking to a friend, when I realized I hadn’t seen my brother. I called his name. And then I started screaming his name. And then I saw him, floating face down, and my heart just stopped. I dragged him from the water. My friend helped me, I think, I don’t even remember. He was so little. When we pulled him on to the riverbank, I screamed at him and I shook him, and he was dead. Just dead. A man ran over. He had a fish tatoo on his face. In Volantis, the slaves have tattoos..This man worked on a fishing boat. And he pushed me out of the way. You have to understand, for a slave to push a highborn girl, that’s death, a terrible death…He started pressing on my brother’s chest again and again and again, until my brother spat up half of the Rhoyne, and cried out, and the man cradled his head and told him to be calm. I decided two things that day. I would not waste my years planning dances and masquerades…and when I came of age, I would never live in a slave city again.

Robb’s been attracted to her all along, but it’s this tale of personal alchemy that unmans the young king, leaving him unable to honor his obligations or resist a woman who performed the kind of transformation he needs to undergo in reverse. Making love to her is an act of transgression, a violation of his pledge to pay for the bridge crossing with his future. But if Talisia became what seemed impossible, perhaps Robb can find it himself to transcend his lack of training and take up his kingship, finding a way to become “one of the good ones.”
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I admit I’m totally shocked by this statistic. But it turns out that 60 percent of the audience for Girls, Lena Dunham’s post-Sex and the City take on the lives of sheltered young post-graduate women in New York City, is male. MediaPost, the source of that statistic, suggests that some of it might be men sticking around after Game of Thrones, though if those men were uninterested, you’d think they’d burn off during the half hour airing of Veep that happens in between the end of Game of Thrones and the start of Girls.

I’d be curious to know why those dudes are watching—and Slate’s deconstruction of the show every Monday by a slate of male viewers has become one of my must-reads to start the week. Is it to get insight into the lives of young women? Is it to laugh at Hannah and her friends because their lives are such a horror show? I’m glad for the evidence that men are more than capable of turning out for a show about a female protagonist, an anti-heroine, even. I just hope they’re not turning in because they hate Hanna Hovarth more than they’re actually interested in her.

There’s been a lot of discussion over the past couple of days about why HBO hasn’t made its content more widely available to non-cable subscribers. While I understand individual consumers are frustrated, I think we need to reckon with the fact that this is not a problem of a single premium network. It’s a limitation of an ecosystem that also happens to have produced the kind of environment where HBO can make the content that makes it so desirable.

Erik Kain started the current wave of this, first blaming HBO for piracy, then, arguing that HBO should offer HBO GO as a standalone service and that the company would make more from those subscriptions than from its current arrangement from cable companies, and eventually backing off for some of the reasons I’ll articulate. But it’s important to reiterate that a stand-alone service is not a minor change . There are major forces at work here, and both HBO and we would do well to be attentive to them.

First, I agree with Yglesias that commentators, particularly those of us who cover entertainment technology, tend to dramatically overrate the extent to which cord-cutting is actually happening and to which consumers want to and are dropping their cable in favor of streaming services. Even if broadband gets cheaper and broadband adoption gets more serious, that doesn’t mean that people are going to prefer streaming services to cable. As I wrote earlier this week, people are dropping cable subscriptions, but not yet in a way that indicates a cultural shift rather than a tough economy. The cable companies aren’t wilfully ignoring overwhelmingly compelling evidence. They’re waiting out a trend to see if it’s real. And until sports in particular, a much bigger driver of cable subscriptions than the premium networks, get unbundled from cable, I’m just not sure we’re going to see huge, permanent accelerations in this trend, particularly if use of streaming services like Hulu gets tied to authentication of a cable subscription or a tacked-on fee.

Second, waiting that out isn’t evidence of idiocy or a desire to do harm to consumers (though it’s a mystery to me why folks who consume content assume entertainment companies’ main purpose is to be nice to them rather than to make money). HBO and other premium cable channels have a very solid and established business model here. Cable subscriptions overall may be dropping, but HBO added 190,000 subscribers in the fourth quarter of last year, the biggest growth the network’s experienced since 2006. Folks may not like paying for bundled cable, but there isn’t actually compelling evidence that HBO in particular rather than cable companies in general should be worried about cord cutting.

And though Erik suggested that it would be easy for HBO to make up lost revenue by charging more for HBO subscriptions, I think he dramatically understated the difficulty and unpredictability of that move. It’s not just that “HBO has deals with cable companies that may make this move difficult, and quite possibly very expensive.” It’s that there is no way the cable companies would let this go quietly. At all. As Todd VanDerWerff put it:
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When Luck was cancelled in March, I wrote that it would be nice if we could get as upset about the health and safety of reality show participants as we do about animal cruelty on set. The New York Times has a disturbing new report about the state of horse racing in New York state that serves as an upsetting reminder that there are people inside the industry who don’t care very much about the fate of the animals they’re entertained by and make a great deal of money by racing even when it’s clear that their bodies are broken, the rot at the snapping point disguised by drugs:

“The horses go perfectly sound right up to the second they snap their leg off,” Mr. Clifton said. The following day he came back with a warning: “If we have one more horse break down, we are going to have a major problem on our hands.” That night, riding in the fifth race, Mr. Clifton heard a bone snap and saw another jockey, Ricky Frazier, vaulting off a horse named Laughing Moon. Mr. Clifton yanked his own mount, but they still went soaring over Laughing Moon. Within minutes, Mr. Frazier was in an ambulance and a veterinarian was administering a lethal injection to Laughing Moon, the ninth Gill horse to die racing in 10 months.

That is when the jockeys decided to take a stand: They would not ride in any race with a Gill-owned horse. Their boycott cast a harsh light on the Pennsylvania Racing Commission and Penn National Gaming, which owns the track.
“It wasn’t the commission or the racetrack or anyone with any responsibility for horses and riders who took action,” said George Strawbridge, a prominent breeder and owner. “It was the jockeys who feared for their life. That’s not a shame. That’s a disgrace.”

The fact that inspections of horses at the track before they race aren’t standard from state to state, giving owners like Michael Gill, the one described in those paragraphs, the ability to essentially go shopping for venues where they can race unhealthy horses, is deeply upsetting. I’m not saying horse racing needs to be federally regulated. But it’s hard to believe that track owners and racing commissions couldn’t come to relatively standard conclusions about the desirability of keeping horses from getting unrepairably injured on the track if only in the interests of keeping jockeys safe. And anyone who thinks watching animals hurt themselves dreadfully is part of the entertainment might want to take a careful look at themselves.

Were you planning on cutting the cord on your cable as soon as Hulu signed a few more content deals and let you watch your favorite shows the day after they aired? Think again. The New York Post reports that Fox is renegotiating its deal with Comcast in a way that would require Hulu to require users to prove that they already subscribe to cable in order to get access to its content. The authentication system would likely work the same way: users would log in to Hulu with their cable company logins, rather than with a Hulu ID. Fox is already somewhat more restrictive about its content than the other major networks (with the exception of CBS, which puts almost none of its content on Hulu and declines to stream many episodes at all). Currently, you have to have Hulu Plus to stream Fox shows the day after they air. Otherwise, you have to wait a full week to watch the shows supported only by ads.

It makes sense that now is the time Fox would strike. Hulu (and Netflix as well) are early in their efforts to create original content. And while those companies say publicly that their original shows are meeting their expectations, they haven’t been precisely clear about what those expectations were, or whether that means they’re even close to garnering network-level (or even cable-style) audiences for that programming. They’re nowhere near close to telling the television networks to shove it, so Fox is striking in what it sees as one of a few remaining moments of opportunity, especially because it wants to make sure it can retain the cash to pay its retransmission fees. The cable companies need to hang on to their subscribers both to ensure their own profits, and to meet their own outside demands. Until retransmission fees are out of the equation, it’s hard to imagine that this model is going to change dramatically.

The summer after I graduated from college, I watched all of Sex and the City as reassurance that I wouldn’t be sexmurdered, as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit seemed determined to tell me, and after 30 Rock premiered that fall, as reassurance that, short and bespectacled though I might have been and remain, there were options beyond Liz Lemonhood. I say all of this not to let you know that you will only like Girls, Lena Dunham’s brilliant new comedy for HBO about four young women fumbling through their early lives in New York if you liked Sex and the City. Quite the reverse. Those of us who love Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha will see ourselves, and be able to laugh at ourselves in Girls. But there’s an enormous amount there for those of you who didn’t. And while the show is unfortunately really, really white for a show set in New York City, on all other counts, it’s a show so good it’s almost implausible to me that it was made at all. Need specifics other than my good word, which appears at great length here in an essay for The Atlantic based on a long interview with Dunham? Here are five reasons to watch Girls after you get your dose of Game of Thrones on Sunday:

1. It’s hilarious: “The totem of chat. The lowest, that would be Facebook, followed by Gchat, then texting, then email, then phone. Face to face would be ideal, but it’s not of this time.” “I wouldn’t take shit from my parents. They’re buffoons. But my grandma gives me $800 a month…I supplement. But it gives me the freedom to not have to be anyone’s slave. You should never have to be anyone’s fucking slave. Except mine.” “I was live-in educator to these three children, and they all sang, and their father was a brilliant pacifist thinker.” These three lines from the pilot aren’t even close to the funniest things the characters say in that half-hour alone. And it gets funnier from there.

2. It’s delightfully progressive about sex and sexual health: Girls is one of the only shows on television where people talk about sexual health and reproductive rights like actual people in real life do. “What was she going to do? Have a baby and take it to her babysitting job? That’s not realistic,” Dunham’s character Hannah says when her friend Jessa (Jemima Kirke) gets pregnant and decides to have an abortion. In a delightful parody of oversoberness about reproductive choice, Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) tells Jessa, who is smoking a joint the night before her procedure, “What you’re going through is like really, really hard for any young woman, and it totally makes sense that you would want to escape through drug use. But you have to know, you’re not just my cousin. you’re my friend. And I could not be more proud of you for getting this abortion.” When Hannah heads in for an STD test and one of her friends makes fun of her obsessive fear of AIDS, Hannah grumbles “I have obsessive fear of HIV that turns into AIDS. I’m not a fool.” And Dunham told me that she worked extremely hard to make sure a subplot in which her character is diagnosed with HPV and tries to find out how she could have gotten it medically accurate. That accuracy and frankness goes hand-in-hand with well-developed plots and very funny dialogue.

3. Lena Dunham is basically the female Louis C.K.: Emily Nussbaum made the comparison explicit in her New York Magazine cover story—and reports that Dunham once dressed up as C.K. for Halloween. The comparison is apt: whether it’s Dunham’s bodily frankness, the relentless and hilarious chronicle of failure and self-criticism, or even masturbation, Lena Dunham is a younger, more hopeful version of Louis C.K.

4. It’s one of the only shows on television where the characters have realistic wardrobes and apartments: Dunham turned down the larger sets HBO offered her to make it easier for the cameras and crew to get around in favor of making sure her characters would live in reasonably-sized apartments—she told me of New Girl, “I love that show, by the way, but every week there’s a new room I didn’t know was there! It’s like that real estate dream you have in New York, where it’s like over there! Over there! Over there! It’s really wild, that New Girl apartment.” And she fit her costumes with Spanx on, but didn’t wear them she was shooting so Hannah’s clothes would look like they didn’t fit, a symptom both of her lack of money and of the way the character hasn’t quite settled into her body.

5. The friendships are wonderful: Rebecca Traister expounds on this theme at length in Salon, reveling in the way that Girls shows that friends can be your true partners. That larger point aside, it’s just fun to see the characters go through what seem like well-worn conversational paces—”Sex from behind is degrading. point blank. You deserve someone who wants to look in your beautiful face, ladies,” Shoshanna reads from an advice book, only to have Jessa snap at her “What if I want to focus on something else?”—curl up in each other’s beds, rock out to Robyn. Speaking of which…

6. The show’s sense of pop culture is spot-on: This may seem like a little thing. But Girls does a tremendous job of actually populating the show with references, conversations, and music playing in rooms that the characters would actually watch and listen to. Whether it’s Robyn, or Kelly Clarkson, or a game show hosted by Jerry Springer called Baggage, in which people reveal their worst secrets (Hannah says of hers: “My littlest baggage is probably that I am unfit for any and all paying jobs. My medium baggage is that I bought four cupcakes and ate one in your bathroom just now. And my biggest baggage would be my HPV.”) Culture is a way we communicate with each other, and find the people we like. That Girls gets this right is just another indicator of its commitment to creating scenarios that are wonderfully emotionally true.

The bridge is yours.

-M.I.A. apparently wrote the theme song for a talk show Julian Assange is doing. Our world is silly.

-These comics sound great.

-Really sorry HBO isn’t doing this.

-The origins of Ron Swanson.

-This looks like a lot of fun:

New In Theaters:

-The American Pie franchise wraps up this weekend with American Reunion: the humor’s as gross as ever, but there’s some real pathos there. And Alyson Hannigan in fetishwear.

-Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope: Morgan Spurlock’s latest is more sizzle reel than introspection, especially on issues of race and gender in the fan community. But there’s some fun to be had there, especially following aspiring artists and a costume designer for whom Comic-Con is a giant job fair.

On Television

-Starz debuts a new original series at 10 PM on Friday, Magic City, full of Jewish families, union busting subplots, Cuba’s fall to Castro, the arrival of casino-running gangsters in Florida, and gorgeous architecture—and people. The show’s uneven in the early going, but there’s potential there.

-Game of Thrones is back on HBO on Sunday with the second episode of its second season, and there are lots of fascinating gender politics on tap. Catch up, and we’ll discuss on Monday.