Daily Archives: June 26, 2017

In the seven years since you first played Angry Birds , French mobile game studio Rovio Entertainment has released 14 follow-ups. Yes, 14 , only one of which you can call a sequel. The others included spinoffs, expansions, racing games, match-three games, shoot-em-ups, a Transformers tie-in, and two very angry Star Wars games. This isn't a franchise; it's an app store unto itself. And now, after a European release last year, the latest installment has landed in the US: the turn-based role-playing game Angry Birds Evolution . I cannot fathom why it exists.

Start up Angry Birds Evolution , which violates all mobile design principles by forcing your screen into landscape mode permanently, and the battle begins almost immediately. Mechanically, it's a bit like pinball meets Final Fantasy . Instead of choosing attacks from a menu as in other turn-based combat games, you slingshot your birds in classic Angry Birds fashion, sending them careening around tiny combat arenas. As you progress, you accrue a larger team of birds, level them up, and take on tougher and tougher teams of inexplicably green pigs.

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None of this really works. Even compared to the pantheon of light and easy phone games, I found the combat utterly brainless. My eyes actually unfocused as I played it. Angry Birds Evolution also boasts some of the worst sound design I've heard in any game. It features, so far as I can reckon, two songs, one of them a remix of the other, and both cloying beyond measure: unhinged percussion and self-conscious wackiness, with the whip-zang-pow sensibility of a sitcom parody of a Saturday morning cartoon. The visual design is straight out of the 2016 movie , which is to say it's terrible. The whole thing is a limping, confused affair, incomplete in a dozen different ways.

Rovio Entertainment

Yet, Evolution is a fittingly strange game for a strange franchise. There's nothing particularly appealing, or fun, about Angry Birds as a brand, nothing iconic about an eternal battle of birds against pigs. As the developers have noted before , pigs became the antagonists only because the game's development happened to coincide with swine flu being in the news. What made the original game a hit was its stroke of design genius: Rovio found in the slingshot a perfect idiom for a touch interface. The great charm of Angry Birds was the joy of playing. The great charm of Angry Birds Evolution is that it's free.

Unearthing a bad game just to say that it's a bad game seems cruel, I know. But it's provides a glimpse at the future of branded content. Not so long ago, a game like Angry Birds Evolution would scarcely be a game at all. It would barely work, feel thrown together by one hapless coder and a marketing team; crash after the first level, and still cost you $9.99.

Now, though, Evolution embodies an entirely different development strategy, one that recognizes that consumers are savvier than they used to be. It's a complete game that works, an original twist on the Angry Birds conceit, and exhibits some understanding of the broader gaming scene. It strives for irony, a postmodern savviness in the face of its own unconcealed profit motive; it jokes about the mainstream games it borrows ideas from, and piles on the schtick: There's a Zelda reference, a bird named Kim Fli Hy that's modelled after Kim Jong-il (concerning, if not quite racist), and a black-bobbed bird named Mia that I only now recognize as a Pulp Fiction reference. The jokes don't necessarily land, but they're there, and they represent an attempt to dress up a cash-in as something more personal and creative.

Even if you don't play Angry Birds Evolution and seriously, don't play Angry Birds Evolution it's worth noting these shifts. Brands know they can't sell broken nonsense anymore. For consumers, that might not be much, but it's better than it used to be.

Read more from the original source:

Glimpse the Dark Heart of Branding With Angry Birds Evolution - WIRED

Enlarge / A young Charles Darwin, before evolution had caused any public controversy.

In the US, opponents of evolution have tried to undercut instruction on the topic by suggesting schools should "teach the controversy." The national education authorities in Turkey, however, have decided that teachers should avoid any hint of controversy in the classroom. In service of that goal, the country is pulling evolution out of its high school curriculum entirely. The change will be implemented during the upcoming school year, 2017-2018.

In Turkey, the curriculum for state-run schools is set by the national government. The move against education in biology came as the state education authorities were undertaking a review of the national curriculum. Reports indicate that the review largely resulted in an emphasis on religious themes and Turkish culture and history, at the expense of information on Mustafa Kemal Atatrk and his role in the founding of the modern Turkish state.

But science got caught up in the process somehow. According to the head of the national board of education, Alpaslan Durmus, the problem is that Turkish students aren't given the necessary scientific background to separate the theory from the controversy that it has generated in some communities:

We are aware that ,if our students don't have the background to comprehend the premises and hypotheses, or if they don't have the knowledge and scientific framework, they will not be able to understand some controversial issues, so we have left out some of them."

So, rather than bring the students up to speed on biology in earlier grades, Turkey has chosen to drop the subject entirely. If students want to understand biology, they'll have to continue studying the topic in college.

The move has alarmed secular Turks, who are viewing it as a further encroachment by religious conservatives. Like many other countries, Turkey has a religiously motivated creationist community (one that includes some rather flamboyant public figures). But, until the election of Recep Erdogan, religious figures had little influence on national policy.

Read more here:

Turkey pulls evolution from its high school curriculum - Ars Technica

Perhaps, with the ascension of Ruth Davidson to political superstardom and the glorification of Sir Walter Scott on current Scottish banknotes (south of the border, were going for Jane Austen on our tenners), we will all revisit Ivanhoe. The story, youll recall, is set during the reign of the Lionheart King, who is away on crusade business, killing Muslims by the thousand. Like the good Christian monarch he is.

Scotts narrative has a prelude. A Saxon swineherd, Gurth, is sitting on a decayed Druid stone as his pigs root in the dirt. Along comes his mate Wamba, a jester. The two serfs chat. How is it, Gurth wonders, that swine when it reaches the high tables of their masters is pork (Fr porc); cow becomes beef (Fr boeuf); and sheep turns into mutton (Fr mouton)?

The reason, Wamba explains (no fool he), is 1066. Four generations have passed but the Normans are still running things. They have normanised English and they eat high on the hog. How did pig become pork? In the same way as minced beef sandwich, in my day, became Big Mac.

Ivanhoe should be the Brexiteers bible. Its message is that throwing off the Norman Yoke is necessary before Britain can be Britain again. Whats the difference between Normandy and Europa? Just 900 or so years. Scott makes a larger point. Common language, closely examined, reflects where real power lies. More than that, it enforces that power softly but subversively, often in ways we dont notice. Thats what makes it dangerous.

Weve thrown off the Norman Yoke but it remains, faintly throbbing, in the archaeology of our language. Why do we call the place parliament and not speak house? Is Gordon Ramsay a chef or a cook? Do the words evoke different kinds of society?

Matthew Engel is a journalist at the end offour decades of deadline-driven, high-quality writing. He is now at that stage oflife when one thinks about it all in his case, the millions of words he has tapped out. What historical meaning was ingrained in those words? It is, he concludes, not the European Union but America that we should be fearful of.

The first half of his book is a survey of the historical ebbs and flows of national dialect across the Atlantic. In the 18th century the linguistic tide flowed west from the UK tothe US. When the 20th century turned, it was the age of Mid-Atlantic. Now, its all one-way. We talk, think and probably dream American. Its semantic colonialism. The blurb (manifestly written by Engel himself) makes the point succinctly:

Are we tired of being asked to take theelevator, sick of being offered fries andtold about the latest movie? Yeah. Have we noticed the sly interpolation of Americanisms into our everyday speech? Its a no-brainer.

One of the charms of this book is Engel hunting down his prey like a linguistic witchfinder-general. He is especially vexed by the barbarous locution wake-up call. The first use he finds is in an ice hockey report in the New York Times in 1975. Horribile dictu. By the first four years of the 21st century the Guardian was reporting wake-up calls some real, most metaphorical two and a half times a week. The Guardian! What more proof were needed that there is something rotten in the state ofthe English language?

Another bee in Engels bonnet is the compound from the get-go. He tracks it down to a 1958 Hank Mobley tune called Git-Go Blues. And where is that putrid locution now? Michael Gove, then Britains education secretary, used it in a 2010 interview on Radio 4. Unclean! Unclean!

Having completed his historical survey, and compiled a voluminous dictionary of Americanisms, Engel gets down to business. What does (Americanism alert!) the takeover mean?

Is it simply that we are scooping up loan words, as the English language always has done? We love Babel; revel in it. Ponder a recent headline in the online Independent: Has Scandi-noir become too hygge for its own good? The wonderful thing about the English language is its sponge-like ability to absorb, use and discard un-English verbiage and still be vitally itself. Or is this Americanisation what Orwell describes in Nineteen Eighty-Four as Newspeak? Totalitarian powers routinely control independent thinking and resistance to their power by programmatic impoverishment of language. Engel has come round to believing the latter. Big time.

In its last pages, the book gets mad as hell on the subject. Forget Europe. Britain, and young Britain in particular, has handed over control of its culture and vocabulary to Washington, New York and Los Angeles. It is, Engel argues, self-imposed serfdom:

A country that outsources the development of its language the language it developed over hundreds of years is a nation that has lost the will to live.

Britain in 2017AD is, to borrow an Americanism, brainwashed, and doesnt know it or, worse, doesnt care. How was American slavery enforced? Not only with the whip and chain but by taking away the slaves native language. It works.

Recall the front-page headlines of 9 June. Theresa on ropes, shouted the Daily Mail. She was hung out to dry, said the London Evening Standard. Stormin Corbyn, proclaimed the Metro. These are manifest Americanisms, from the metaphor hanging out to dry to the use of Stormin the epithet applied to Norman Schwarzkopf, the victorious US Gulf War commander of Operation Desert Storm.

These headlines on Theresa Mays failure fit the bill. Her campaign was framed, by others, as American presidential, not English prime ministerial. But the lady herself ispure Jane Austen: a vicars daughter whose naughtiest act was to run through a field of wheat. She simply couldnt do the hail to the chief stuff. Boris, the bookies odds predict, will show her how that presidential stuff should be strut. He was, ofcourse, born American.

Engels book, short-tempered but consistently witty, does a useful thing. It makes us listen to what is coming out of our mouths and think seriously about it. Have a nice day.

John Sutherlands How Good Is Your Grammar? is published by Short Books

Thats the Way It Crumbles: the American Conquest of English Matthew Engel Profile Books, 279pp, 16.99

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