Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

The percentage of this movie’s budget spent on eyeliner must have been insane.

That said, I enjoyed Sucker Punch, but for the moment I’d like to concentrate on how wrong the film’s critics are. A 22% at Rotten Tomatoes? A 33 at Metacritic? Tell me, critics, when you watched the trailer, what did you think this movie would be? As far as I can tell, Zak Snyder delivered what the trailer promised: a film in which scantily clad women engage in a series of imaginative, over the top, fantasy fight sequences. It’s true that there isn’t much in the way of dialogue or a meaty plot, but the visual ingenuity usually makes up for it. I don’t understand any reviewer who would call this movie boring. What was boring, exactly? The part where the girls mow down an army of clockwork Nazi zombies? The part with the gigantic dragon? Or what about the part with all that rape?

Here’s my problem with every single review of this movie. Whether the critic is trashing it or composing a ridiculous love note to it (“Snyder belongs near the top of a very short list of directors who are trying to reinvent a personal, auteurist vision of cinema…”), not one of them says a substantive word about the incredible level of sexual abuse experienced by the protagonists. The film opens with Baby Doll (Emily Browning) enduring—and please note, none of what I’m writing here is exaggeration—her mother’s death, her sister’s murder (and probable sexual abuse) at the hands of a monstrous stepfather, and incarceration in a mental institution where the only thing she has to look forward to before her scheduled lobotomy is more rape and abuse courtesy of the institution’s chief orderly. This, according to the Onion AV Club, is ”drudgery”.

How is it that a person can spend whole paragraphs excoriating a director for “tired CGI” and “stilted writing,” and yet say absolutely nothing about the graphic abuse endured by the movie’s women? Camera work warrants more attention than rape, forced lobotomization, prostitution, execution-style murder, and more rape? How could someone sit through this movie and not have something to say about these things? And again, how blind do you have to be to pronounce this material boring?

I will grant you that the dazzling fantasy sequences feel entirely disconnected from the depressing crazy house, but that may actually have been intentional. Over at the BARCC Blog, Dave has a brilliant insight; that the layers of fantasy that comprise Sucker Punch are the characters’ way of dissociating from their unbearable reality. I hesitate to give Snyder too much credit here. If that was really his intention, you’d think he might have beefed up the writing just a little, instead of closing the film with some of the most godawful gobblydeegook I’ve ever heard (and folks, Donnie Darko is one of my favorite movies). Still, it’s an intriguing notion that dramatically changes one’s experience of the movie.

Lastly, I’d like to really nerd out for a second. I think there’s a lot of ambiguity as to which of the women is controlling these fantasy worlds. Sure, Baby Doll is our main protagonist and virtually all the action takes place from her perspective, but I’m still not sure. As Baby Doll transitions into her first layer of fantasy, her trip to the mental institution becomes an act being rehearsed on stage by Sweet Pea. Was that just Baby Doll’s way of pushing the entire mental institution onto someone else’s plate, or is Sweet Pea actually the one in control? Ultimately (minor spoiler) it is Sweet Pea who escapes the mental institution and encounters the Wise Man out in the real world. And it seems odd that Baby Doll’s fantasies—if they are her fantasies at all—would include the notion of self-sacrifice from the outset. I think you can read it either way, and it’s that kind of storytelling that makes me think Zak Snyder might be on to something.

A new study on sexual attraction has been making waves this week, as studies about sex often do. We’re talking about sex between lab mice, of course, but still, the study has produced headlines like, “Did Chinese Scientists Turn Mice Gay?”

Well, did they? I’m not a geneticist or molecular biologist, but my answer would be, “Not really.” The authors examined the sexual behaviors of “knockout” mice, so called not because of their devastatingly good looks, but because they have been genetically engineered with a particular gene deactivated or “knocked out” of their DNA. In this case, the gene was responsible for the production of serotonin, a chemical strongly implicated in depression and other mental states. The researchers found that these knockout mice were more likely than control mice to engage in sexual behaviors with other males. As such, lots of journalists are speculating that there’s a connection between depression and homosexual behavior, or perhaps even a neurochemical “cure”. A controversial idea, to be sure, but not one that’s strongly supported by the data.

Again, this sort of thing isn’t really my jam, so I’ll be brief. Here’s a selection of data from the paper (simplified). We’re most interested in the red and pink bars, which represent the knockout mice (all other colors represent various types of control mice). A) shows how long it took the mice to mount a male or female introduced to its cage. The knockout mice were quicker to mount both males and females, and did so with little preference. B) shows the percent of USVs (ultra-sonic vocalizations, basically mouse love songs) emitted toward males and females. The knockout mice emit just as many USVs toward females as the control mice, but also emit a large number of USVs toward males. Finally, the researchers introduced a male and a female simultaneously to the knockout mice. C) shows the mounting choice made for each. Again, the knockout mice appear to exhibit normal behaviors toward females, and elevated sexual behaviors toward males.

The results would indicate not that the mice have been “turned gay,” but that they’ve been made extremely promiscuous. They are quicker to engage in sexual behavior, regardless of the sex of the partner mouse. As for the “gay cure” angle, the researchers do show that normal sexual behavior can be restored if the knockout mice are injected with serotonin, but given what I’ve already discussed, I don’t think anything is being cured. Serotonin injections just seem to suppress unusually high levels of sexual promiscuity.

You can interpret these data another way, and I find it strange that the authors overlook it. Serotonin performs many functions in the body. Yes, it’s implicated in depression and happiness, but it also regulates blood pressure, appetite, sleeping/waking, muscle contraction, and a number of other things (in fact, 80% of serotonin in humans is found in the GI tract, not the brain). Notably, in both humans and mice, serotonin also acts as a vasoconstrictor, causing blood vessels to tighten and restrict blood flow. The opposite of vasoconstriction is vasodilation, which, incidentally, is how Viagra works. Viagra started life as a vasodilation therapy for heart disease. It’s just a remarkably profitable stroke of luck that Viagra’s vasodilation effects send blood rushing to certain popular areas of the human body. It’s possible that these knockout mice are essentially “Viagra mice,” perpetually vasodilated, and therefore more likely to be aroused by anything with a pulse.

While wandering around PAX East’s gargantuan Expo Hall, I found myself inexplicably drawn, over and over, to the Chessex booth. This is a company whose sole product is dice. Don’t be fooled by their awful website, these people are serious about their product. The booth was bordered by bin after bin of dice, meticulously arranged by color and number of sides. They had dice of every hue, material, size, and shape you could possibly imagine, and many that you couldn’t. I picked up a set of 6-sided dice labeled in Roman numerals for the Tall One, as well an odd pair whose sides were labeled as noun/verb/adjective and who/what/when/where/why/how. On dice! Also one with some mathematical symbols on it. And two 6-sided dice that I just really, really liked the look of. It was at this point that I finally managed to wrench myself from Chessex’s candy-colored grasp, gazing in wonder at the hive-like activity of nerds picking out dice, like bees pollinating a field of flowers.

Did I need these dice? No, of course not, but that’s hardly the point, and at about 50 cents apiece, it’s not like I’m risking a plunge into massive dice debt. My recent purchases have, however, gotten me thinking about dice and basic probability. Given a roll of two dice, how likely are you to get a particular value? What patterns do these numbers obey? Just how lucky is 7? If the guy running an RPG tells you that you need “a 6 or better” to win this encounter, just how easy or hard is that? I’m not an expert in probability or even a mathematician, but I thought it’d be fun to investigate these questions. Dice and data come from the same Latin root, after all.

I can remember playing a board game with my dad, maybe Monopoly, maybe Parcheesi, where he decided to drop some Dad Knowledge on me: 7 is the most common roll of the dice. Roll one die, and no matter what number comes up, there’s going to be a number on the second die that can make the two sum up to 7. This is not true of any other combined roll. If I’m trying to roll a 6, for whatever reason, and 6 comes up on the first die, I’m guaranteed to overshoot. So, given a pair of 6-sided dice, 7 is the most common roll. But how common? If I were a proper mathematician, I’d squint really hard and pull an elegant formula from the depths of my brain. But I’m a psychologist and statistician, and increasingly, we prefer R. So I’ve used R to simulate one million rolls of a pair of 6-sided dice. Here’s the resulting distribution of rolls:

It turns out that these rolls follow a perfectly triangular distribution. I can already hear the statisticians in the audience furrowing their brows, and no, these numbers do not follow the more common normal distribution. The odds do not follow a bell curve, but rather, your odds of rolling a particular number decrease linearly from the peak of 7. This is true of all two-dice rolls, and if you don’t believe me, here’s a simulation of two 20-sided dice:

Boom. Triangle. Based on these simulations, we can extrapolate some rules for the probability of rolling a particular number. Given a pair of n-sided dice, the most common roll will be n + 1. The odds of this roll are 1/n. The odds of the other rolls decrease linearly as you move away from the peak, bottoming out at a probability of 1/n² at the ends. So using a set of 6-sided dice, the most common roll, 7, has a one in six chance of being rolled. Rolls of 2 or 12 have just a one in thirty-six chance of appearing.

The statisticians in the audience are probably starting to feel a longing for their beloved normal distribution. Luckily for them, the distribution of possible values starts to approximate a normal distribution as more dice are added. Here’s the simulation for one million rolls of three 6-sided dice:

This is definitely the familiar bell curve, albeit a slightly platykurtic one. Great word, right? Platykurtic. It means that the peak is slightly flatter than you’d expect compared with a perfect bell curve.

One last thing. I’ve often played tabletop games where I’m told that I need to roll some number or better, for instance, “You need a 7 or better to win this encounter.” Based on the distributions we’ve covered so far, it’s a simple matter to transform them into game-appropriate cumulative functions:

You have a 100% chance of rolling a 2 or better (duh), whereas you have just a 3% chance of rolling a 12. The curve is nonlinear, a fact which I doubt most DMs ever keep in mind. So if I’m the DM and I want my party to have a 50/50 chance of winning the battle using their 6-sided dice, the roll they need is 7.5 or better. Obviously that’s not possible, so the real question is whether I want the roll to be slightly easier (7 or better) or slightly harder (8 or better). What I find interesting is that 8 feels like a fairly high roll, but in fact, you’ll roll an 8 or better 42% of the time.

If you’re rolling a single die the odds of getting any particular number are uniform, assuming the die is fair. But the minute you start messing around with multiple dice, the underlying distribution changes and begins to approximate the probabilities of real-world statistics. The more you know, right?

In 1961, newly elected FCC chairman Newton N. Minow (actual name) famously declared that television was a “vast wasteland”. Minow believed that television had the potential to be something truly great, but then, as now, it was too full of superficial, meaningless garbage and grating, obnoxious advertisements.

Fifty years after Minow’s speech, I couldn’t help but think of him as I toured the exhibition floor of the Penny Arcade Expo and evaluated the plethora of 3D technology on display. I might be misremembering last year’s PAX, but it seemed like the only 3D technology on the floor then was a small section of NVIDIA’s booth, a timid, tentative offering that nevertheless managed to draw a perpetual crowd. This year, NVIDIA was pushing 3D as hard as it could. Its booth—more accurately described as a small mall of game technology, such was its size and layout—was dominated by 3D. The booth was fronted by a 3D-capable monitor 103 inches in size. Passersby could pick up any one of a dozen 3D glasses to experience the effect for themselves.

That experience, I’m sorry to say, is disappointing. It’s not that it doesn’t work; I’m practically stereoblind, and even I was able to perceive some depth in the displays. But just because a thing works, that doesn’t mean that it’s worth your time. 3D projection is taxing on two fronts: it requires a variety of technological trade-offs to work properly, and makes unusual, often uncomfortable demands of an observer’s visual system.

The biggest trade-off is brightness. One way or another, the 3D setup has to send two separate images to each of your eyes. This means that the image is going to look, at best, half as bright as it would under 2D viewing conditions. This may be acceptable in a movie theater, where you’re sitting in front of a massive screen that pours tons of light into an otherwise completely dark environment, but it’s terrible in the context of a living room or a show floor. With my 3D glasses on, screen images appeared dismally murky. Details were lost and some scenes became entirely unintelligible. The goggles felt awkward to wear, especially over my eyeglasses. In short, it’s an uncomfortable viewing experience of questionable value, to say nothing of the cost of the technology. No person is in his right mind would spend the hundreds, possibly even thousands, of dollars necessary to play a 3D game in his own home.

One intriguing alternative is Nintendo’s 3DS, which uses a variation of the “hologram” cards that were popular in the 80s (you know, hold it at one angle, you see one picture, hold it at a different angle, you see another). When you hold the 3DS at just the right angle, the screen beams two separate images into each eye, creating a depth percept without the need for expensive monitors or dim glasses. The image is bright, and lining yourself up is simple. That the effect works at all is extremely impressive, but I still question the practically. If you’re like me, you move around when you play games, and if you move the 3DS out of its narrow “sweet spot,” you’ll get a double image instead of 3D. Though promising, it’s worth keeping in mind that this method will only work with a handheld system, and cannot be adapted for a television.

Now let’s talk vision science. For the record, what I have to say here applies to 3D movies as well. 3D projection is not natural, or as we might say in the lab, it’s not ecologically valid. The human eye regularly performs two related but independent actions: convergence and focus. Hold up a finger at arm’s length, then move it toward your face. As you keep your eyes on your finger, you’ll notice two things. One, your surroundings will fall out of focus as your finger gets closer to your face. Two, your eyes might start to feel weird. This is because they’re converging at a fairly extreme angle. Essentially, you’re crossing your eyes. Out in the real world, focus and convergence always change in tandem. But in a 3D movie or game, your point of focus is constant (the screen), while convergence changes depending on the contents of the scene. I don’t suppose you’ve seen the trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean 4? The trailer is in 3D, and like most trailers, it cuts rapidly from shot to shot. The depth plane changes every few seconds, and it’s completely exhausting. The human visual system simply isn’t built to process the world this way.

3D suffers from artistic problems, too. Designers and directors have had over a hundred years to learn how light, color, texture, and spatial arrangement affect a scene. We have no such body of knowledge for the manipulation of depth (da Vinci and Picasso notwithstanding). Nobody designing 3D games, or directing 3D movies, really knows how to use 3D effectively. I watched someone play World of Warcraft in 3D for about fifteen minutes. Every time he killed a monster, a large notification would float over the screen at the front of the depth plane, obstructing the ongoing action. The effect was distracting and ugly. And we’re talking about Blizzard! A company that spends years meticulously honing its games for the optimal playing experience, one of the few companies that actually conducts rigorous research for these sorts of issues. If Blizzard can’t do it right, who can?

Since I’m not stereoscopically normal (neither is Penny Arcade’s Mike Krahulik, apparently), I went out of my way to ask other people at the show how they felt about 3D. Most people at the NVIDIA booth seemed unimpressed. They complained about the subtlety of the 3D effect, the dimness of the images, eye strain, the inability to spectate if you weren’t wearing 3D glasses, and the general awkwardness of these systems. People were more positive when asked about the Nintendo 3DS, which makes a certain amount of sense, as Nintendo’s system is much less cumbersome and produces brighter images.

So that’s the shape of 3D: a wasteland of finicky technology, dark, muddled images, and uncomfortable customers who can barely manage to feign enthusiasm for the duration of a show, let alone hours in the living room. That kid playing World of Warcraft? He wasn’t playing it because it was 3D. He was playing it because he loves World of Warcraft. If 3D is to have any kind of future, it needs to create compelling experience that you can’t get in 2D, and I’m not sure that such a thing is possible.

During my hours in the exhibition hall, I also caught Ubisoft’s Child of Eden. More accurately, it caught me, as well as everyone else who passed within sight of it. Child of Eden looks like something out of the year 2045, a rhythm-based first person shooter that relies on the Xbox Kinect for interaction. Players fly through the game’s trippy environments simply by waving their hands. I didn’t get a chance to play it for myself, but even as a spectator, the experience is incredibly immersive. The flowing visuals and organic pace of action are mesmerizing, and seeing players control the game without a physical controller was downright arresting. An awe-inspiring piece all around, and not a 3D goggle in sight.