EA Sports designed virtual players in college sports video games to look and play like their real life counterparts, according to testimony from a former company executive obtained by AL.com. The games didn’t, and couldn’t, use the names of those players under NCAA rules, the same rules that let EA Sports and other companies profit off of those athletes without paying them a dime.

Former EA producer Jeremy Strauser and EA executive vice president Joel Linzner both testified in December as part of former University of California-Los Angeles basketball star Ed O’Bannon’s lawsuit against EA Sports and the NCAA. The suit claims that both violated antitrust law by using the images and likenesses of former college athletes without compensation. Both Strauser and Linzner testified that EA Sports, which is trying to get out of the case, designed players to resemble the actual players they were meant to depict, AL.com reports:

Jeremy Strauser, who worked at EA from 1995 until 2011, testified last December that computer-game avatars were linked to specific player identifying numbers and biographical information, such as team depth charts, was used to make the game realistic.

“We generally tried to make the players perform as their real life counterparts, short of their name and likeness,” Strauser testified. [...]

Linzner said the video game’s purpose is to “evoke or create the impression that these are the real life counterparts, and the heights and weights are sometimes accurate and sometimes not.”

Well, of course they did. Anyone who has ever played any of the EA Sports games based on college athletics knows that the players in the game, from position to number to height and weight to skin color to skill level, are based off their real-life counterparts (notice how much this guy looks like this guy?). That’s why EA Sports comes out with a new game each year, because nobody wants to play with USC or Alabama’s rosters from last year when they can have a more realistic experience by playing with their rosters from this year. If it wasn’t (some dude who looks like) Matt Barkley throwing the football to (two dudes who look like) Robert Woods and Marqise Lee, well, EA Sports would almost surely sell a lot fewer games. At the least, they’d have to market the games as far less realistic experiences.

It isn’t just video games: Nike and the University of Kentucky didn’t spend all of 2012 selling #23 basketball jerseys at random. They sold #23 jerseys because UK’s star player, Anthony Davis, wore #23. College bookstores around the country, and retailers who sell college merchandise, do the exact same thing, and they do it because nobody wants the walk-on’s jersey.

The NCAA argues that none of this matters because they aren’t using the players’ names or images, and thus they aren’t exploiting actual people. But of course they are, and everyone knows it. Because if they weren’t using the likenesses of actual people, they wouldn’t be making nearly as much money by using them in broadcasts, selling merchandise based off of them, or selling their rights to video game manufacturers. That’s precisely what makes the entire system such a sham, and precisely what makes the O’Bannon case so promising: it has a chance to bring the entire sham to light, one admission of the obvious at a time.

None of that means that O’Bannon is going to win the lawsuit, which is still far from over. The next step is a hearing in June that will determine if the case can be certified as a class-action complaint, which would allow current college athletes to join the case. If that happens, the O’Bannon case won’t just serve as a valuable exposé of the absurdity of college athletics. Rather, it would have the chance to bring the entire system crumbling down.

By Tony Palumbi

“Can’t change the past? Why, of course you can!”-Jay Gatsby

“What if you woke up and realized you didn’t like what you chose?” – Booker DeWitt

Bioshock Infinite starts and ends with water—the player pushed and held under water in two starkly different baptisms. One is a symbolic birth and the other a fairly literal death, but they bracket this phenomenal game with what I see as its overriding theme: changing the past. Whether we’re talking about fact or fiction, there’s nothing more distinctly American than a troubled relationship with your own history. Infinite is one of the most-discussed titles in years, but I’ve yet to see anyone tackle its approach to hagiography and classic American fiction.

Every culture paves over some terrible events, but the United States occupies a privileged position. We’re the land of second chances, our own immigrant history so close and personal we can’t help but embellish it. Ta-Nehisi Coates (among others) has written great pieces about our relationship to the Civil War: the convenience of believing that there were Black Confederates, or that the Confederacy was defending democratic principles rather than fighting to keep slaves. Believing in America’s fundamental goodness requires that we find a way around the always-messy Present. So we create a golden, perfect Past that’s always just past the western horizon, whether before Lincoln’s tyranny or before a pill divorced pregnancy from sex.

So when Bioshock Infinite’s protagonist is introduced in the year 1912 with a box inscribed “Booker DeWitt, 7th Cavalry, Wounded Knee,” we associate him first with one of America’s great crimes. Within minutes he’s rocketing into the air and being “reborn” in baptism as a condition to enter the sky-city of Columbia. He emerges from the water into a chapel garden built to honor Columbia’s religious idols: Jefferson, Franklin and Washington. Columbia isn’t so much a living city as a museum through which Booker makes his way, taking time out between effervescent gunfights to admire distant statuary through public coin-op binoculars. There’s even a lengthy sequence in a history museum, where Booker is fed “revised” accounts of Wounded Knee along with the Boxer Rebellion.
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Over at NPR, Sami Yenigun has a story that points out while the debate over whether popular culture inspires real-world violent actions is far from settled, there is one concrete link between the entertainment industry and the gun industry: product placement in films and licensing of gun images in video games:

Last year, Call of Duty earned half a billion dollars in a day. That same game features the long barrel and angled cartridge of a .50-caliber sniper rifle that’s a virtual copy of a real Barrett gun. According to Vejay Lalla, a lawyer who works with clients to clear brands in video games, that’s very much intentional. “Game developers essentially want to make sure that games are as realistic as possible,” he says.

So if the makers of Madden NFL want to use, say, the New England Patriots in their video game, they have to strike a deal with the NFL; and if the makers of Need For Speed want a bright orange Camaro in their game, they’re going to have to talk to Chevrolet.

Lalla hasn’t personally brokered any deals between gun companies and video game companies, but he says product placement for guns works the same way. Video game makers use realistic, brand-name weapons, and then depending on how the brand is portrayed, they decide whether to license the name. “If the gun is instrumental in the game or visible or used often, then typically there is a clearance process involved,” Lalla says

Obviously, the use of guns in video games, movies, and television, and the use of other implements of mayhem, including fists, have their own distinct appeal. Hand-to-hand fighting lets a character in film or television demonstrate their toughness in myriad ways, from their ability to take a punch to their willingness to inflict damage on someone else in a direct way—The Americans has done an excellent job of this with Elizabeth Jennings character, whether she’s fighting back against an attacker in training or beating Claudia, her handler, and an older woman, in retaliation for Claudia ordering Elizabeth and her husband interrogated. Similarly, fighting games let players step into someone else’s body and take on someone else’s capacities. And fist fights can be a way of making entertainment violence more visceral and more personal, closing the physical gap between combatants, or between assailant and victim. Or it can abstract, showing characters who have the capacity to take inhuman amounts of damage and keep going. But whatever they do, they can’t really burnish the image of or encourage the purchase of a particular product. We all have fists already.

If the entertainment industry wants to distance itself from the gun industry and from real-world violence, there are a couple of things they could do that would improve their range of storytelling as well as cleaning up their consciences. They could stop licensing images of specific weapons and, in products that aren’t live action, design their own weapons. Directors could change the way they shoot weapons as aesthetic objects. Writers and directors could vary the ways that guns are used and cause harm, including incidents where they’re brandished but not discharged, their use in suicides, and accidental gun deaths, rather than portraying them as objects that are only associated with heroic competence. The Good Wife‘s first-season episode “Bad,” for example, did a nice job of exploring a range of feelings about gun possession ranging from Kalinda’s ease to Diane’s discomfort—the episode didn’t deny that guns can be used effectively in self-defense, but it acknowledged that Diane wasn’t comfortable using a gun that way and that she had a perfect right to stay as far away from guns as she wanted to. And Lord of War, one of the more underrated elements of Nicolas Cage’s ouvre, did an extremely effective job of parsing both our fascination with guns and our revulsion with what they can actually do to human bodies and human beings. Like any story-telling element, guns can get monotonous if they’re used the same way every time. Acknowledging their power and mixing up their use could be a path to creative revitalization, and to giving Hollywood a stronger position than pulling episodes of television shows in the wake of disaster does.

Over the past year or so, the discussion about the portrayal of female characters in video games, and the employment of women in the industry that produces those images has been particularly heated. But for all the challenges this industry faces, a new survey of video game producers suggests that gaming companies may actually be outflanking television when it comes to improving the representation of women in certain positions, and in making pay equitable for male and female producers.

According to the latest edition of Game Developer Magazine’s annual salary survey, in 2012, 23 percent of video game producers are women, a year-on-year increase of 7 percent over 2011, when women represented 16 percent of producers. That’s a significant shift in a single year, and it’s a kind of progress that would be striking in the television industry, where progress in shifting the composition of the writing workforce has been notably slow. Between the 1999-2000 television season and the 2011-2012 television season, the percentage of female television writers rose from 25.5 percent to 30.5 percent—as the Writers Guild Of America, West pointed out “At this rate of increase, it would be another 42 years before women —roughly half of the U.S. population – reach proportionate representation in television staff employment.”

And the gap between the 2012 average salaries for male and female producers in video games was $6,602—$78,989 for women versus $85,591 for men. That’s a smaller gap than the one between male and female television writers, which in 2009 was almost $10,000, with an average salary of $98,600 for female writers, compared to an average of $108,000 for men. And women actually make more than their male counterparts in one area of the industry, programming and engineering, even though they hold only 4 percent of those positions.

Now, there are differences between these industries: video games are produced on a project basis, while television shows can either run in an open-ended way, or end after a discrete amount of time, though both of those possibilities are open-ended. But the ends of television seasons often provide opportunities for shows to bring in new writers—Aaron Sorkin, for example, famously has a tendency to clean out his entire writers’ room at the end of each season—and would provide opportunities to shift the demographics of writers’ rooms. In either industry, changing the ratios are largely a matter of will. And it’s great to see an industry like video games, which has a shorter history than television, demonstrate that even in a culture that’s known for male fans and male characters, if you want more women working on projects, you can find it. Maybe if the video game industry continues to make progress, everyone else will feel pressure to catch up.

Golf’s most iconic tournament, The Masters, begins Thursday at Augusta National Golf Club, which has traditionally faced scrutiny this time of year because of its male-only membership policy. Last fall, though, the club relented and extended memberships to two women, former Secretary of State Condolezza Rice and private investment executive Darla Moore. Ahead of The Masters, Rice walked the grounds at Augusta last week clad in one of the famous green jackets donned by Augusta members and Masters champions.

Augusta’s first female members aren’t the only milestone for women in golf this spring, though. On March 26, EA Sports released Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14, the latest in its line of video games named after golf’s biggest star. And for the first time ever, the game features the Ladies’ Professional Golf Association (LGPA) Tour alongside the men’s tour.

Gamers have long had the option to play the game as female professionals like Natalie Gulbis. The new version, however, gives them the option to play not just as women but to create female players and play a career mode that takes them up the amateur ladder to the LPGA Tour. It even includes the Kraft Nabisco Championship, the biggest tournament on the LPGA Tour schedule. And in a nice touch of gender equality, the game also allows female players to compete against the men on the PGA Tour, which isn’t unrealistic: LPGA players Annika Sorenstam and Michelle Wie have both competed in men’s events before.

This isn’t entirely new territory for EA, which included international female stars in NHL 13, its hockey line, and plans to add female players and teams to its line of soccer games in the coming years. Still, it’s a welcome step to include not just a handful of recognizable female athletes but the entire league in which they compete, particularly given that some versions of the game are branded with the Masters logo and that it was released in time for this week’s tournament.

There are more than 6 million female golfers in the U.S., according to the National Golf Foundation. Plenty of them are LGPA Tour fans, and plenty of them also play video games. As I wrote when EA announced it was including women in NHL 13, its great that the company is acknowledging that women deserve to be able to identify directly with avatars when they play these games in the same way men do. More importantly, video games can have a major positive experience on young people like the girl whose father hacked Donkey Kong to make the princess the hero. So in a sports world where women still face sexism and questions about their legitimacy as athletes, something as simple as equality in virtual reality can go a long way in planting the seeds of equality in actual reality too.

After launching a Kickstarter campaign to fund a long-term project that would examine the roles women play—or are consigned to—in video games, Feminist Frequency video blogger Anita Sarkeesian was subject to a vicious, violence-saturated campaign of harassment. While it was awful to watch Sarkeesian be threatened and slandered for the sin of wanting to do her job well and comprehensively, the utter inability of her harassers to shut her work down has been wonderful to watch.

And I’m cheering Sarkeesian’s perseverance even harder now that the first installment of her project, titled Tropes Vs. Women, is out—and it’s terrific. Examining both the depiction and gameplay of characters like Pauline, Princess Peach and Zelda, Sarkeesian goes back to the origins of the Damsels In Distress trope art and literature, explores how the trope migrated into video games after the rights to Popeye characters couldn’t be secured for a video game, and examines how the trope became valuable to the video game industry:

At the beginning of the video, Sarkeesian, explaining that “This series will include critical analysis of many beloved games and characters,” says something that everyone who loves a piece of culture ought to be required to recite five times every morning while looking in the mirror: “Remember that it’s both possible and even necessary to simultaneously enjoy media while being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.” If that ability to hold two ideas in your head at the same time, to enjoy something while recognizing that it might have problems, is what the people who tried to harass Sarkeesian into silence are so afraid of, it only reinforces how intellectually cowardly and inept they are. The need for something to be immune from criticism isn’t a sign that it’s perfect and everyone else is wrong: it’s a sign you can’t defend the things you love. That’s a position any self-aware person ought to be embarrassed to defend.

Given that efforts are continuing to pin blame for gun violence on violent media culture, the content industries are responding proactively with a new and voluntary campaign to help parents understand the tools that already exist to help them keep their children from consuming media they find disturbing:

In the news release on Wednesday, representatives for the industries said they would “make a positive contribution to the national conversation on violent behavior by launching a national educational campaign through communications channels including television public service announcements, educational and informational websites, in-theater advertising, and other media.”

The industry representatives include the lobbying groups for filmmakers, theater owners, broadcasters, and cable operators. They said the public service ads would appear on television and on the Web in the months to come. The ads will remind parents about the existing television and film ratings systems and the parental controls that are built into most television sets. Ads about the film ratings system will also be shown in movie theaters.

As someone who was very effectively kept away from violent movies, television, and video games as a child—though not from an extremely violent graphic novel version of Frankenstein, which gave me nightmares for months—I’m genuinely curious as to what options the parents in the audience wish they had to regulate their children’s media useage that aren’t available to them now. I totally understand that it can be jarring to have advertising for violent or sexual content come on during or in front of programming that itself is rated for general audiences. And I imagine trying to prevent content creep both at school as children get older and have more autonomy over how they spend their time, and as kids visit other people’s houses where video games are more widely available or certain channels are unblocked, must be a constant source of frustration.

The first problem is one that could be fixed by voluntary self-regulation on the part of movie theaters and television broadcasters, in coordination with movie studios and video game manufacturers. The second is harder, and involves lots of conversations with your children about what hard, scary things mean, and what makes you uncomfortable, and what makes them uncomfortable. And the latter probably involves some limits-testing and kids encountering things that upset them, and that they decide they’re not ready for. That’s a risk I think some parents don’t particularly want to take, but it seems to me to be a fairly necessary part of children and young adults developing their own internal set of limits, which are likely to be more effective than simply asking them to abide by parentally-determined ones.

But beyond those ongoing efforts and voluntary regulation by the industry, and excluding the idea of bans on certain kinds of content on the grounds that censorship is neither desirable nor implementable, what are the resources you wish you had? Better channel-blocking and web-monitoring software? Guides to talking about certain kinds of images, like gun violence or sexual assault? Or are you all set?

As the debate over gun violence has heated up in Washington after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, it’s included, quite predictably, multiple calls for the study of the relationship between violent media, particularly video games, and mass shootings. But the subject of video games as an academic subject came up in another context yesterday when House Speaker John Boehner tweeted “Re: #Obamaquester, no one should be talking about tax hikes when govt is paying people to play video games.”

He appears to be referring to a grant two researchers at the North Carolina State’s Gains Through Gaming Laboratory received from the National Science Foundation in 2009 to study how playing World of Warcraft affected brain cognition in senior citizens. Their research dealt with a limited pool of seniors, and had mixed results, but found that some senior citizens who scored low on a baseline test of cognition saw gains after playing the massively multiplayer online game. And it’s not the only grant the NSF has given out to academics who study video games. Bonnie Nardi, a professor at the University of California, got a grant in 2008 to study World of Warcraft players in the United States after doing research on their Chinese counterparts. And Indiana University’s Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing got $686,000 to study the creative communities that form in the World of Warcraft and the online retailer Etsy.

I don’t doubt that Boehner would find all of these studies equally ludicrous. But they’re a reminder of the challenge that serious scholarship about video games faces. Lawmakers—and frankly, many of their constituents—tend to be interested in studying video games when there’s a chance they can be made a scapegoat for larger social issues like gun violence. It’s a predisposition that, as Daniel Greenberg pointed out in a recent piece in The Atlantic, means research that finds positive benefits from video game play gets undercovered, and that studies that point to negative effects of gaming are accepted at face value even when their results are ambiguous:

That “good reason” includes the fact that the tests that some researchers use to measure aggression have never actually been validated for aggression, just for competiveness. At best, all the anti-game researchers can show is that imaginary violence leads only to imaginary violence. At no time can they show that imaginary violence ever crosses over to cause actual violence. Or even real aggression. Just competiveness.

These biases mean, as I’ve written before, that even if the various proposals to study video games and violence are adopted by Congress and signed into law by President Obama, it’s impossible to believe that the resulting research would resolve this debate once and for all. If the results show no relationship, they’ll be ignored, and after the next spasm of gun violence, the calls for research will begin again, with the people behind them hoping that a fresh round of studies will demonstrate a relationship they badly want to be there.
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In an absolutely amazing story, Carol Tilley, a professor of library and information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, went through the research notes that anti-comics crusader Fredric Wertham took on his interviews with research subjects for Seduction of the Innocent, his book on the social and psychological impacts of comics—and discovered that he was faking the data. As a report on her work explains:

Wertham’s personal archives, however, show that the doctor revised children’s ages, distorted their quotes, omitted other causal factors and in general “played fast and loose with the data he gathered on comics,” according to an article by Carol Tilley, published in a recent issue of Information and Culture: A Journal of History….

As she pored over his files, she began to recognize the case notes of children referred to in “Seduction,” and typing their quotes into her laptop computer. But when she returned to her hotel room and compared her notes to Wertham’s book, she found numerous inconsistencies. “I thought well maybe I’ve missed something, maybe I typed incorrectly,” Tilley said. So she began photocopying portions of Wertham’s files and comparing them closely to his book. “That’s when I realized the extent of the changes.”

For example, in “Seduction,” Wertham links “Batman” comic books to the case of a 13-year-old boy on probation and receiving counseling for sexual abuse of another boy: “Like many other homo-erotically inclined children, he was a special devotee of Batman: ‘Sometimes I read them over and over again. … It could be that Batman did something with Robin like I did with the younger boy.’ ”

What Tilley found in Wertham’s notes, however, was that the boy preferred “Superman,” “Crime Does Not Pay” and “war comics” over “Batman,” and that he had previously been sexually assaulted by the other boy – all information that Wertham left out.

The whole thing is a wonderful reminder not to trust an argument just because it has an academic imprimatur—or because the people who advance it get an opportunity to present their ideas to Congress. And if our discussion of gun control continues to include calls to investigate a theoretical link between popular culture and gun violence—Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA) is the latest legislator to get on that particular bandwagon—Tilley’s findings should be a cautionary tale for the researchers tasked with the study. I’d hope it’s harder to commit academic fraud today than it was in Wertham’s time.

But given that we live in a moment when 67 percent of Republicans think that violent video games present a “bigger safety threat” than guns according to a recent Public Policy Polling survey, the same kind of incentives to find video games guilty exist today that existed when Wertham went after comics. And even if a rigorous study does emerge from our current debate over guns policy, I’d be amazed if it was publicly accepted. The public doesn’t blame comics or video games for crime and violence because they have strong evidence and day-to-day demonstrations of the impact of that media. They blame comics and video games because they have relatively low levels of cultural capital relative to mediums like film and television, and because it’s easier to think about regulating culture than it is to go after other, more systematic elements of American life.