Hacker Cinema
The Hunger Games
2012 · Film · 142 min
Part of The Hunger Games Collection
Directed by Gary Ross
Science FictionAdventureActionThriller
In a dystopian society where the Capitol forces each district to send two young tributes to fight to the death in a televised spectacle, a girl volunteers to take her sister’s place, setting the stage for a struggle of survival and defiance.
7 positive8 negative74 neutralfrom 89 commenters
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91 comments on Hacker News
The hunger games is also about an authoritarian society with mass surveillance, though?
WWZ is about a literal zombie outbreak, and while I can't comment on whether the book is actually using it as a vehicle to critique or extrapolate real-world social systems, the movie sure as hell didn't.
Without going into a very long rant about Bethesda missing the point of Fallout as a universe, suffice it to say that it is also not intended to be a serious examination of what life might or even could become, ever. In fact, it was intended to be a platform for social critique via parody and caricaturism.
The original idea I think was they were biological components in a digital/biological computer complex. The Matrix sets up scenarios, and the human brains interact with them in human ways which are sometimes of use to the machines. Meanwhile, the machines see all of it and can monitor for problem humans. ISTR this was tossed as too intellectual for an action movie.
Another option to either The Matrix or Star Trek is Idiocracy, only there’s an elite group of humans and AI in charge over the deteriorating masses. Let’s not count out The Hunger Games or Elysium.
If you think watching Idiocracy feels too on point for current events, try giving a (re)watch to The Hunger Games movies, too.
80% of the federal workforce is based outside of the DC/Maryland/Virginia area.
The ones who are around the capital are the ones doing policy or back-office work that’d be the equivalent of a corporate HQ, and they have benefits from being concentrated in a region where there’s a lot of other Federal back office work because they can recruit from a talent pool of people who are experienced in the particular requirements of Federal work. It’s the same sort of agglomeration effects that drives finance to concentrate in NYC or the film industry to concentrate in LA.
Taking the USDA as an example, it doesn’t literally operates farm. The vast majority of what it’s doing is functionally insurance and financial services. The stuff that needs direct interaction with farms like inspections or scientific research are done out of field offices.
If America has an equivalent of The Capitol from Hunger Games where a bunch of absurdly wealthy and out of touch elites pull the strings on how the rest of the country lives for their own benefit, I’d submit Wall Street or Silicon Valley before I posit DC.
Interesting that the runners-up were much more conventional choices, Pride and Prejudice and To Kill a Mockingbird.
I've never read Mockingbird; I gotta say that it doesn't sound like a fun read. I really admire Jane Austen, though I find her books a bit of a slog even now. (I really hated them when compelled to read them in high school, though with the aid of some film adaptations I have a much better understanding of what those books are about.)
Hunger Games does nail a sweet spot of Young Adult fiction: compelling, easy to read, but not completely dimwitted.
The first Harry Potter book might have been a good choice, but it's really a juvenile rather than YA, and that narrows the audience somewhat as a "favorite book". Later Harry Potter books are more appealing to older readers, but no single one of them quite captures the lightning of the first one.
I think it's important because there are a bunch of would-be claimants for intellectual property violation. Many people speculate that their work was used in training data, but it can be difficult to produce sufficient proof that their copyrighted work is present in the training data. If you could reliably get an LLM to produce 70% of a copyrighted book that would probably be enough to get a few lawyers salivating.
I didn't read the source paper referenced in the ars technica piece, but this statement about it makes me wonder how useful it actually is:
> But a study published last month showed that researchers at Stanford and Yale Universities were able to strategically prompt LLMs from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and xAI to generate thousands of words from 13 books, including A Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, and The Hobbit.
It seems like well-known books with tons of summary, adaptations into film scripts, and tons of writing about the book in the overall corpus make it way less surprising to see be partially reproducible.
So I guess that's a lot of words to say - yeah until there's something definitive that allows people to prompt LLMs into either unlawfully recreating an entire work verbatim or otherwise indisputably proving that a copyrighted work was used in training data, there's probably nothing game changing in it.
Yes. The Hunger Games film and book inspired by the Japanese film "Battle Royale" in turn, inspired the Minecraft minigame. But later battle royale games were inspired by the minigame, not the films directly. A shrinking world border, for instance, is pretty important to make the concept work (in a film, it doesn't actually have to work!).
Last man standing formats were perfectly possible in traditional FPS formats too, but they weren't really a thing because to actually be fun, the format needs
1. Big maps and lots of players (more than the typical FPS)
2. A "searching for loot" mechanic, where you can increase your chances of survival by looking for good items, making interesting risk/reward tradeoffs and discouraging just turtling up in the most defensible location.
3. Shrinking borders, to prevent an anticlimactic endgame of powerful players searching for hiding stragglers.
Minecraft basically had all three since 2014, and there were quite popular last man standing formats like UHC even before they had world border (and before the Hunger Games film came out).
>Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does.
"Mainstream counter-culture" is certainly a funny turn of phrase. That's largely the problem with it, there's a great book, The Rebel Sell[1], about how American counter-culture isn't the opposite, but the actual driver of American commercial culture. The Hunger Games is not authentically creating any kind of subversive message, to be a Hunger Games rebel is mainstream. Baudrillard, who is featured in the Matrix, used to remark that the the Matrix is the kind of movie the matrix would make to think you've won. The Wachowskis who are very American did not understand S&S.
Japan's counter culture has always been much more serious because it's always been much less interested in spectacle. There's very few things that stand out as much as Oshii's Patlabor II when it comes to genuine criticism of, in that case, the role of Japan during the cold war and the ways peace tends to be fake in many ways.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rebel_Sell
> Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does.
I would put Akira in that bucket, but I see your point.
The way counter-culture is brought into mainstream is a lot more strategic in Japan, and the reader is expecting to do more deciphering work than in Blade Runner for instance.
E.g. Final Fantasy is overtly about fighting a Zaibatsu like corporate overlord that's depleting the vital resources of an environment. But what's promoted is gun-swords, spiky hairs and cute or sexy fighters.
Same way Reiji Matsumoto's Galaxy Express 999 is a 113 episodes long dissing of the corporate culture but it's all behind psychedelic tropes.
Those are arguably mainstream, given the money,an-hours and corporate weight invested in them and the general reception.
But none of them will put the main message up-front as much as Hunger Games would for instance, there is always a veil of flashiness that needs to be peeled to get to the substance.
(to note, SF live action is a lot harder to fund in Japan. I'd attribute that to the existence of anime which is so much more cost effective. With the budget for a live action Gundam you could make three TV series)
Gibson was obviously very inspired by Japan. The Matrix was also in part directly inspired by Ghost in the Shell, even creating The Animatrix at the same time. But Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner was told from the inside. It is about the authorities chasing down rouge elements. Neuromancer and The Matrix is from the perspective of the outsiders.
Like someone else said in the comments here, cyberpunk is counterculture. It is in the name. Gibson moved to Canada to avoid getting drafted into the Vietnam war. Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does. Considering the overlap between cyberpunk and anime, I would actually say that Japan is sometime given too much credit by being treated as the superior original with deeper meaning. When it is Western media that have explored more advanced and diverse interpretations.
A similar thing happened with Battle Royale. A niche movie. The same concept became a cultural phenomenon with The Hunger Games, and later Maze Runner and Divergent series. And then video games. Now made from the outspoken perspective of the teenagers.
So you should absolutely credit the US counterculture and environment for a large part of cyberpunk and dystopian, but also more utopian science fiction. I don't even like Hollywood much, but it still has a far wider catalog than anyone else. Who else could make Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare or even Star Trek: Voyager? Disney made Andor by the way.
Light: '80s/'90s kids might remember: https://www.buckwiki.com/data/Computer_Council
Serious: Though, if you look at the current big players in AI, rather than being benevolent geniuses, most have obvious major problems, especially with being driven by ruthless self-interest, and even sociopathy.
While there are some parallels with a certain country's national voting behavior (e.g., "Sure, the candidate is a vicious psychotic narcissist, but he's our vicious psychotic narcissist!"), you wouldn't want to trust any of those companies with leadership of the world.
At best, the AI council would collude with each other, against the people they ostensibly serve, while backstabbing each other as a secondary goal. At worst, one would decide, if they can't win completely, then everyone loses completely.
That Buck Rogers AI future for Earth would quickly look less like Star Trek utopia, and more like Hunger Games or Elysium dystopia. If not one of the countless post-apocalyptic film settings that are increasingly easy to imagine or extrapolate.
I vividly remember watching Battle Royale with my college roommate, and when it was over, we looked at each other and said "this would be an incredible premise for a video game". This would have been like 2004. We even tried to mod it into the original FarCry engine (the island setting was perfect), but it was too difficult for us. Too bad we didn't actually have the chops to do it, could have gotten the jump on Fortnite/PUBG by over a decade lol. Really wish we had stayed motivated, looking back on it.
edit: But yes, Battle Royale is a great movie, and Hunger Games totally rode its coattails.
I always thought of Hunger Games as Battle Royale for children. The violence and darkness in general is so very stripped down. IMO that's what made Battle Royale and, as you point out, Squid Game interesting. I do think that's more common in Asian cinema and tv though.
>They all present societies which have solved social and material problems through progress, or which are still solving them, critiquing an image of the Western world in the 20th century. None of them nab at any kind of biting truth relevant to young readers today.
What are some examples of scifi you're referring to there? Because the noteworthy scifi stories I can think of, ones which drew enough attention to be televised at least, are stories like the hunger games (dystopian), divergent (dystopian), the new star trek series (which I haven't seen but I understand shoehorned scarcity back into the startrekverse), Foundation (fall of a golden age), The Expanse (dystopian) etc. I think the only optimistic scifi I've read in the last twenty years or so was Anathem, and there's no way that's getting a miniseries.
Maybe it's a function of the authors I follow, but I just don't see this optimistic contemporary scifi you speak of, naive or otherwise.
There’s a Black Mirror episode somewhere in here akin to the Hunger Games.
I sympathise with many of your points -- kinda feel your expectations for the Hunger Games were a bit high though. There's a lot more lacking from those movies than violence depiction. And it's also why the "no kids zone" approach is so problematic.
As you point out birth rates are falling, and society thoroughly making sure the fun stuff happens where no kids are allowed is both easier to do than ever, and accelerating that trend to an extent that is hard to describe.
I think people will still want kids, and couples in the right time and place will have one. But not two, or three. Because once they'll experience how it feels to be cut from society as an adult for about a decade, it's a real tough choice to go through that again given all the other sacrifices (career, money, housing, the sheer grunt of it) while getting no sympathy for it ("previous gens all did it, why you complain ? Also can't that kid shut up ?")
"no kids zone" in all nice places is fine if we all accept that we don't really need population renewal or have alternatives ways to preserve our species (There must be some movie with a plot of growing kids on a farm upstate until they're ready for societal life ?)
Some people want areas without kids. Why should that be illegal? Kids ruin most things, as as society gets older and childless, those that want to have fun in said society will lobby for changes. Movies in cinema all suck ass because they need to cater ages 13 demographic. Latest Hunger Games movie is prime example. Any time violence is supposed to happen, they cut away from the violence and merely imply violence happening. No-kids zone is what made HBO so successful -- it releases shows with wildly disturbing, no kids allowed, avant garde themes. If you do not allow explicit no kids zones, people will yearn for these zones and the supply will be met. Just with different justifications.
I feel like some of the examples you list are a poor choice to illustrate your point.
Both Harry Potter (books so more than films, but in the films too) and Aang have plenty of flaws, and there's arcs and events that help them grow/develop.
It's been a while, but Katniss does have plenty of flaws and growth (and even some things she never overcomes about her self). Although, it's been a few years since I've read Hunger Games, I feel like she doesn't belong in the same category as Bella (which feels like a placeholder character intentionally). Tris from Divergent might be a good example though, but even there there's some growth.
Regarding some of the super heroes: they're all kinda "super" and very mary-sue-ish, I agree. But they still face challenges and difficulties they need to overcome, or the stories they're part of (rather than the character themselves) are otherwise interesting.
Most of the modern "strong female leads" are just boring (and this comes from a gay boy who LOVES strong women, my favourite characters are women: Sydney Bristol, almost every one from ATLA & Korra, Willow & Buffy, Halliwell sisters, Xena, Lara Croft, Jade from BG&E, women from Harry Potter, Aya from Parasite Eve games, an uncountable plethora of amazing female characters in Anime and manga, and I could go on and on and on, it's not like it can't be done, or hasn't been done, it has been done MANY times). The only challenge these modern Disney SFLs face is not believing in themselves (and as someone who struggles on and off with self esteem issues, I realise how difficult those can be, but also it's not "enough" to base a whole character around just that), usually with a sprinkle of "blame the patriarchy" in there too.
All this misandry and trying to portray any masculinity as toxic is just lame. It's very similar to Disney's queer coding of villains. I remember in my teens, while being a sexually confused and closed queer how sensitive I was to that bullshit and how awful and ashamed it made me feel. It's ludicrous how it's being done again, just the aggressor and targeted demographics are different now. I can't tell if that's just Disney's Modus Operandi, or of this is some type of bitter revenge writing. It sucked then and it sucks now, and it will continue to suck. We need to do better.
People mentioned elsewhere in threads that people complain about too many POCs. I've not seen much of this (maybe a few low quality posts online, but that's just racist drivel of a few small minced idiots, and rarely anyone cares about it). What people dislike is their liked characters' identities getting twisted to fit "modern audiences" (often it's MORE than just race). And the irony is, not even this mythological modern audience likes it because it usually ends up being a shallow self insert, so then down the line the audience gets blamed and called names). There's plenty of original PoC characters that are loved (of Disney: Mulan, Pocahontas, Aladdin/Jasmine, Moana, Lilo, Encanto cast). The whole "well why does it matter" argument is also a bit of a bad faith bait. If it didn't matter, why so bullishly insist on changing it?
Okay, sure, I dont see these aspects of the PRC the same way you do.
Taiwan hasn't always been the little democracy victim. They were quite totalitarian until like a couple decades ago. They have a competing claim to the shape of China that makes a mockery of the entire nation state concept. Its fun to imagine a democracy version of China, but a lot of the border disputes would be the same, the status of tibet would still be the same, and so on. Its very similar to the story of the Hunger Games and realizing the liberated 13th district was the same as the status quo. Once we get stateside semiconductors this stops being our problem.
Next, debt-traps. The IMF and World bank do the same, I cant create a separate higher standard for China. These approaches are far superior to colonialism by force, which is an inferior model that the west/US also does. The US’ colonialism currently undermines its own national security by its approach to the middle east. China’s approach completely exempts it from Jihad and allows it trade and growth. Sorry, cant take the US perspective on this one.
Totalitarian norms: I disagree about China’s expansionist ambitions. I think this is once again projection from the west. China’s norm extension occurs when interacting with China, so if you want movies there you have to change the movies, and they monitor their citizens and students around the world. Their business, I wouldnt want to grow up in that environment but its their business.
But everything you wrote reads like projection. Its not just about how hypocritical the west is, our main disagreement is in the scope of China’s political aims. I think culturally they are quite contained, they want a unified China and enhanced trade, thats it. This will be at the expense of Taiwan and fishing zones, and thats it. Countries might even do trade in their currency, omg oh noes.
> Even stupid things like searching for the Wikipedia entry of a movie or TV show has become super difficult with Google lately, because Wikipedia is often buried
I'm always amazed to see claims like this, given it's not how my world works at all. Picking some random popular favorites: searches for (verbatim) "Loki", "Hunger Games", "Oppenheimer", and "House of Usher" all return a wikipedia entry in at worst the second spot (generally behind IMDB, though Oppenheimer and Usher showed the real man and the short story ahead of the films, not unsurprisingly).
I mean, sure, there are glitches with all products and nothing is beyond criticism. But "Google buries Wikipedia results" is just beyond weird. It really seems like HN is starting to develop an "alternative facts" syndrome, where the echo chamber starts driving collective memory.
But that hasn't been a thing since before I was alive. We've had a strong run of popular sitcoms depicting black families on all of the major TV networks since the '70s. Many times they've led the ratings.
And I watched them. Maybe you didn't?
Edit: Heck, "I Love Lucy" aired in the early 1950s and the show's entire plot was about an interracial marriage. And that show only started two years after commercial TV in most homes was even a thing. It was the very first sitcom to be a #1 rated show.
The "bad times" scenario you're depicting is largely a fiction. What was that Jennifer Lawrence quote? “I remember when I was doing 'Hunger Games,' nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie because it wouldn't work — we were told girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead,”
I never got the books argument. Is reading YA novels like the Hunger Games a more highbrow activity than watching movies or playing games like Civilization?
It's not immediately obvious to me.
This was interesting, although I feel the author was making two separate points here. One point was about the popularity of young adult (YA) fiction with adults, and the other was something to do with a book about queer kids being criticized and an attempt to remove it from a public library because children might find it. The thread that connects them was supposedly that the library system circulates 135 copies of 50 Shades of Grey, but how exactly that related to YA lit I'm not sure. The link is certainly weak, or lost on me. (The author started writing fan-fic for YA novels?). Smut has existed forever, certainly before the arbitrary transition period the author of the article has come up with, so I'm not sure I understand the link.
Anyways, of the two points, I find the latter one boring and tired, and so I'd prefer to talk about the first one. The author states:
> My husband and I spent several years putting on pleasant faces when talk over cocktails drifted to “Which Hogwarts house would you belong to?” It all felt so juvenile and regressive. And I believe it was.
I was unable to escape this feeling at the time when Harry Potter was sweeping through the world. I'd just finished Lord of the Rings and, while I picked up a Harry Potter book, I just found it tough to get into. Then I watched the same thing happen with series like Eragon, Wheel of Time, Twilight, Song of Fire and Ice, Hunger Games and more (might have the order mixed up). I've read at least a single book from all those series (except Twilight) and while I've gone back and re-read Lord of the Rings 4 times since, I've never felt compelled to read those series, or watch the movie/TV adaptations.
I've spent actually a not insignificant amount of time wondering why those books never clicked with me, while watching them become sweeping, generation-defining cultura phenomena. It's bothered me, because I've been left out of a lot of "which Hogwarts house are you" type of conversations. But the thing that's really strange is that I kept waiting for everyone to outgrow those books and move on. On the one hand, I understand mass appeal, and I understand not understanding mass appeal. Not everything is truly for everyone, and it never bothered me that those books missed me, but what bothered me was that we never let go of them as a culture. I still know people who call other people "muggles", for instance, even though we're all well into our 30s by now.
There are a lot of things I liked in my youth that I look back fondly on now, but realize they aren't for me as an adult. Music, movies, TV, books (I had my own YA novel preferences), that, at some point, I just walked away from. Some of them were quite good, some of them were of broad appeal, but eventually, I outgrew them. What confuses me so much is society's inability to outgrow a lot of these recent YA novels. The same way I'm confused about how Taylor Swift is still so popular with her original demographic.
There used to be a certain strategy that if you paid attention to, many media companies (especially Disney) would employ: They'd release some media series, say, Star Wars. Then they'd wait until the people who originally were kids/young adults got older, had their own kids, and they'd re-release the property, or release sequels/prequels, etc. (Star Wars being a good example because they've done this 3 time now, with the originals in the 80s, prequels in the early 00s, and the latest batch in the 2020s). You could see clear generational gaps between surges in popularity. But that seems to have just gone away now.
All in all, it's not a real problem. I'm still just as tired of these media properties as I was a few years after they came out, but it's not like it really affects my life. It's just really strange to see the level of persistence, and I can't find any historical comparisons.
I disagree. "Adults are stupid and we have to fix everything for them, sometimes with them even working against us" is an old trope. It was common in the 90s, like with rugrats and pretty much every made for kids movie, but I'd argue it even goes back to movies like Goonies and matilda and Little Rascals.
The mid 2000s dystopia fest in young adult stuff is just follow the leader with Hunger Games. The oppression is used not for it's own sake, but because its an easy excuse for your teens to be more "mature" and more in control of their own lives. It's escapism for teens who think parents "just don't get us"
I am talking about the western society. In the 80s and 90s, you don't really see movies about an entire generation of teenagers being oppressed. The main characters are likely to be teenagers but most adventure stories have teenage main characters.
In the 2000s, you started seeing popular sci-fi books (then movies in 2010s) like The Hunger Games and Maze Runner that depict teenagers as the opposed class.
Personally I think the 2000 Japanese classic Battle Royale started it all.
These are all generally highly reviewed can lead to interesting discussions:
Gattaca - interesting take on genetics/DNA discrimination
Europa - hard science fiction, maybe a bit slow for a 12 year old
The Net - older movie but the concept of digital exile resonates today
City of Ember - post apocalyptic civilization that lives deep underground
First Man - dramatization of Neil Armstrong and the first moon landing (not realy "fiction")
Arrival - first contact situation, tastefully done
Contact - another first contact situation that explores how politics, skepticism, and fanaticism react
The Martian - easily as fun as the book
The Prestige - competing magicians in an industrial age setting
The Hunger Games - extreme class divide in a future setting
Jurassic Park - the original not the sequels
Stargate - wormhole travel to another planet (be careful with the TV shows though, SG1 on streaming has full frontal nudity and "not ok" scenes which were obviously not on the broadcast version and a total shock when we watched it as a family)
District 9 - has some graphic gore and language, so it might be 14+, but is an interesting look at aliens as refugees
Contagion - a look at how a pandemic could play out. Premiered before COVID.
The Maze Runner - interesting setting and look at group dynamics
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids - fun setting
The Village - scary movie with a sci fi twist
Galaxy Quest - comedy
Short Circuit - old movie that deals with AI sentience
Innerspace - another old one, but has some fun concepts
I started watching, because I was lazy and Prime recommended it, and stopped after about 20 minutes in. My impression in that time was "Rebel teenage girl outsmarts everyone in overdone and ugly CGI but we've added something about neuro to make it look sci-fi". It felt like the Hunger Games, but less realistic. I did not know at the time it was written by Gibson, who I admire as an author, but also it did not come to my mind that it could have possibly been written by him. Is the screen adaptation so different from the book, or did they add filler to make 8 (or more?) episodes?
Twitter is now officially the Hunger Games for software engineers, complete with all doors being locked so people can’t escape. Maybe when Musk said he wants Twitter to become more of a video/content site, he meant bringing a film crew to Twitter, turn HQ into a real life hunger games for the few engineers left, and make a show out of it!
The modern Battle Royale mode evolved from multiplayer mods for Minecraft and then ARMA made shortly after the 2012 movie Hunger Games which provided the essential ideas all together (elimination, lots of players, must explore a huge map for items).
I think Minecraft can't be overrated as a vehicle for experimentation in multiplayer modes. Not only did the game have a huge modding and multiplayer community and have support for large player counts and maps, but it's unusually easy to create for and the game itself has no built-in structured competitive multiplayer gametypes, which means there's tons of demand for people to make gametypes from scratch and there's no built-in code for how matches work that needs to be worked around for new ideas to be attempted. Many other online games have specific ideas of how matches work built-in that reduce the demand for brand new gametypes and could make implementing a gametype where matches work differently daunting.
From personal observation and experience, I believe the BR game mode got some traction after the first Hunger Games movie released. After that movie released, I remember all sorts of "Hunger Games" Minecraft maps appearing online. I downloaded, played and hosted a handful of these Hunger Games "last man standing" maps for family and friends to play.
After a few weeks of that, the game format grew stale, and I stopped playing HG maps. Then a few years later a whole bunch of BR games hit the scene and all I could think of was how similar they were to the Hunger Games Minecraft maps.
That's just my guess from personal experience.
Sales from Descender meant I didn't need to do other work during college (it plays perfectly fine in SheepShaver, if you'd like to give it a try), and it probably helped secure me an internship at Apple working on their internal game development team. I helped work on games for clickwheel iPods. Funnily, I'm one of the full motion video characters in Apple's Texas Hold'em!
In 2007, after the release of Intel Macs, I shifted to making original indie games for PC and launched http://doomlaser.com. In 2008, with the release of the iPhone SDK, it suddenly became very lucrative to know how to develop games for Apple devices, and I helped build out the Tap Tap Revenge series. My favorite thing I did for that was the final boss sequence for Justice's Phantom Pt. II in Tap Tap Dance. A friend and I modeled it after the Star Gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q8wLtDFtVQ&t=175s)
Since then, I've gone back and forth between working on personal indie stuff and doing contract work or work in the industry. Helped build the game for The Hunger Games movie, worked on a crazy game for Adult Swim about men transforming into cars, helped build futuristic AR experiences for Niantic's in-house AR SDK, etc.
I switched from building games in my own bespoke C++/Obj-C/OpenGL engines to Unity in 2013. The scene has changed a lot. In the 2007-2011 era, you could pretty much know everybody making cool indie game stuff across the entire world. It was a great time, and a great scene. We all met each other through the TIGSource forums and at events like GDC. It's a much, much larger world now, and thus, it's much harder to stand out. "indie games" as a search term peaked in 2013. But of course, I'm still making my own stuff and also curating cool unique indie game work I see at https://twitter.com/Doomlaser
btw: complimentary serial for anyone who wants to give Descender a try, Name: test Registration #: SDSKSER000-5RF7-068A-7C8F-49D3-4034
I have a friend that works in an Amazon data center and he describes the work environment as “Have you seen any of the hunger games movies?”
I think a lot of tech companies / products at tech companies, (e.g. Netflix, YouTube, Messenger) fundamentally get one thing wrong. They don't "value" the user's time and drive for *maximum* engagement. Maybe the problem is that there's a new sucker born everyday, but I despise using Netflix and YouTube, and I use them only because I have to.
With Messenger specifically, I absolutely don't want to spend quality time with someone communicating over a digital device. I'd much rather just use it to make plans with the person I want to hang out with.
And when I am making plans to spend time with a significant other, if I made a request to a service for "buying two tickets for hunger games at 9pm" and it returned a message saying "I can get you two tickets for shoreline at 9:10pm", I'd want to throw my phone into the ocean. I'd feel differently if I said "buy two tickets to any movie at 9pm", that'd be a completely different story.
This is the same problem with YouTube. If you've recently subscribed to a user, or watched one of their videos for the first time, and then make a search for something completely different, one of a first few results will be a video of the user you initially interacted with. It is SUCH a bonkers user experience for me and I want to never give YouTube any information about myself for recommendations just because of that.
These platforms / products should be just services. Give the user enough information to make the decision themselves, and help them make the best decision with the most accurate and pertinent information. I hate that these products shove content into your face.
Anyone else feel like the golden age of internet services is behind us, and this shitty version is the only path ahead of us?
I always found it interesting how different books for teenagers were from movies considered appropriate for the same age group.
For example, the "Cherub" series by Robert Muchamore, which I greatly enjoyed as a kid, included crime, drug and alcohol use (even by kids), sex scenes, mentions of underage prostitution and human trafficking, and even a scene of an attempted rape on a minor. The much more popular "Hunger Games" series was a little bit less violent, but not by much. Nobody seemed to mind. Those books were clearly intended for teenagers, I'd say 12-16 year olds, and there were no disclaimers about what those books contained.
Even with TV, things aren't as obvious as they seem. Over here in Poland, very few parents care about age restrictions. Unlike English, we don't even have a word for "explicit content". Creating online accounts with fake dates of birth is pretty much normal. When I was in middle school, most people I knew watched porn with very few difficulties. Game stores don't have any obligations to restrict what kids can buy, it's not even clear if refusing a game sale based solely on the age of the buyer is legal[1]. When one game store refused to sell GTA5 to a kid, I heard about it on the news. When I compare people of my generation raised in Poland to our American peers, where explicit content is much more of a taboo, I see no noticeable effects of watching such content.
This has some disturbing censorship implications, how many real-life phenomena are filmmakers omitting to get just a little bit more viewers, just because of some well-intended laws that seem to have no actual positive effect on society?
[1] Polish https://bezprawnik.pl/sprzedaz-dziecku-gry-dla-doroslych/
If it's analogy against "young adult" books you have to consider what the market for "young adults" books really is.
"Young adults" don't buy "Young adult" books, rather public librarians buy "Young adult" books and shelf them in a special section because they believe a collection of "Young adult" books will attract "Young adults" to the library and encourage lifelong reading.
Once a highly prolific author gets labeled a "Young adult" author they are certain to sell a number of profitable hardcovers to libraries and their publisher is likely to handcuff them to the grindstone, the way they did to Piers Anthony. (It is so agonizing to hear Anthony write about he's forced to write those cringeworthy Xanth books.)
It was discovered at some point that "Young adult" books can be turned to gold at the cinema multiplex, so you get movies like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_Games
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_5th_Wave_(film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_(film)
Unfortunately for Anthony those Xanth books are so
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=squicky
that any effort to turn them into film and TV gets stuck in development hell.
Few public libraries collect video games so there is no market for "Young Adult" games marketed to libraries. I suppose you could turn "Young Adult" books into video games but turning books and movies into video games is a much less reliable way to make cash than turning books and video games into movies.
Care to look up the top grossing movie of that year? There is plenty of successful sci-fi including Star Wars, Jurassic Park, The Matrix, Transformers, The Hunger Games, and Avatar. Every genre can produce flops, but many of the most profitable movie franchises have been sci-fi movies.
The Minecraft Hunger Games (later rebranded as Minecraft Survival Games) started in 2012 when that movie was hype and it hit the game streamer scene, cross-polinating the Arma2 modding and streamer scene into creating the "Survivor GameZ" in closed groups, which as legend says, PlayerUnknown couldn't join due to not being a streamer. So he made the "Battle Royal" mod in 2013 as a free for all. It was quite obviously influenced strongly by the movie of the same name. All one big happy family back then. Those were easier times, when it wasn't about "hundreds of millions of paying customers".
You get the same every time this is done: Hunger Games and Battle Royale were also hailed for much more than the competitive brutality idea they were built on, and really they had little else to offer but that. For some reason people seem to feel the need to say they enjoyed it for reasons other than just enjoying inventive, competitive death games (maybe they really do, I don't know).
Anyway, I loved Squid Game but I wouldn't call it remotely deep. It's a formula. You just need to come up with a few decent characters and it practically writes itself.
IIRC, the maker of Squid Game was quoted as being unable to contemplate what a season 2 would involve. Are you kidding? Just put a new bunch of characters through a new bunch of games, sprinkle a bit of extra plot on it and keep up the production values. People will watch an infinite amount of this.
<DerekJacobi>He will bring them death, and they will love him for it.</DerekJacobi>
It's such an uninspired version of Running Man/Battle Royale/Hunger Games/Hostile/Movie of your Choice from the Dystopian "Rich people watch poor people do bad stuff for their entertainment" genre.
IDK, I hate capitalism as much as anyone on this site, but UGH what a boring take.
Honestly, "You" is a much better satire on the platform right now.
I've always maintained that women seem to me subtly more susceptible to peer pressure for most things, and a bigger part of that seems to be representation than for men. This is grounded in the massive shift in how the population of US "programmers" changed from majority women to majority men. "In 1967, there were so many female programmers that Cosmopolitan magazine published an article about “The Computer Girls,” accompanied by pictures of beehived women at work on computers that evoked the control deck of the U.S.S. Enterprise" [1] But in the next decade, there was a massive cultural shift – PCs were sold, and its ad campaigns targeted the image of a young geeky boy playing with toys. The campaigns were successful, so "By the mid-’80s, some college freshmen were showing up for their first class already proficient as programmers." Those were boys who had bought PCs and tinkered with them at home – excluded from ad campaigns, young girls never asked for a PC for Christmas, and they would show up to these freshmen courses like they did before but find themselves already terribly behind. So the number of women in programming started dropping around this time [1]. This was not seen in, say, Russia, which was not subject to the same ad campaigns, and so the number of women in programming stayed about the same. You might note that a lot of the female programmers you find in SV are Eastern European – this is not an accident.
I do also have a citation that showed how the number of women signing up for archery was minuscule prior to the Hunger Games series, but subsequently ballooned and stayed high since. So the above assumption – that visible token women in a particular field makes a huge impact on the number of girls in that field – is based in some fairly well-known effects.
[1] – https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/magazine/women-coding-computer-programming.html
[2] – https://www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/anne-arundel/bs-exho-the-katniss-effect-archery-in-howard-county-gets-a-boost-from-popular-books-movies-20121205-story.html
Did you actually read his interview though? If you’re going to mock your entire genre, you should at least be accurate. Otherwise, critics will rightly point out that you’re writing a genre you don’t know. When you add in that second quote, it’s even more obvious that he doesn’t know his genre.
The dude wrote some books at a team with YA was all the rage and got a film deal out of it. He made some godawful marketing and communications decisions and faced predictable consequences. I don’t feel bad for writers who can’t communicate. Nor do I feel bad for writers who aren’t capable of thinking through how their work fits within a genre they’re trying to capitalize on. Businesses that make bad marketing decisions cancel themselves and in this case, the writer made a myriad of awful business decisions. That’s capitalism.
And seriously, who would outright mock the Hunger Games without expecting some sort of disproportionate backlash? YA works in disproportionates - it’s the entire beast, right down to the growth strategy. If you’re not wise enough to understand your genre, you lose. The thought that you could dismiss that entire genre with garbage critiques and not face bizarre retribution is so insane that I can’t take it seriously.
And if you’re going to do that after you’ve signed a film deal?? I’m sorry but you deserve to be cancelled.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted because you have a point. Remember the controversy that ensued when a black girl was cast as Rue in the Hunger Games movie?
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/white-until-proven-black-imagining-race-in-hunger-games
You're probably right that Hunger Games was the immediate inspiration for PUBG. I understand Hunger Games to basically be an American adaptation of Battle Royale though (and also derivative of The Running Man.) Battle Royale already had "cult classic" status in America by that time. The naming of the genre seems to support the notion that the public was generally aware of Battle Royale. Before Battle Royale the term was in use, but generally referred to free-for-all boxing matches. The modern use of the term to describe Hunger Games or PUBG seems to closely resemble the premise of the Japanese movie/book.
The company's a lot more than just Peppa Pig, though.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/24/peppa-pig-on-track-to-be-2bn-brand-after-making-splash-in-uk-and-asia
> The character is owned by Entertainment One, which makes and distributes TV and films including Grey’s Anatomy, Spotlight and The Hunger Games. The company said Peppa pulled in more than $1.1bn in retail sales, adding that it struck 500 new or renewed deals with TV and product licensing partners in the year to the end of March.
The thing is, most people don't actually need 4K.
In fact, I believe most modern films—including big-budget blockbusters—are still being mastered in 2K (with UHD Blu-Ray discs being upscaled from the 2K masters). My question to anyone for whom spending $300 on an NLE is a big deal: does your project really need more image resolution than titles like Jurassic World and The Hunger Games? Keep in mind that, in addition to spending the $300 on software, your image processing and storage requirements have now quadrupled.
For a close look at the impact of image resolution on cinema viewing, I highly recommend Steve Yedlin's excellent Resolution Demo [0].
[0] http://www.yedlin.net/ResDemo/index.html
Eh, and PubG got it from H1Z1 which got it from DayZ which got it from Minecraft which got it from the Hunger Games movie, etc. Welcome to remix culture.
What's interesting is that fortnite underwent almost exactly the same journey as H1Z1. Start as a paid PvE, release free BR, cancel survival and focus on BR.
It's been a point of contention recently, the question of who created battle royale. Perhaps Greene is responsible for the modern iteration of it, but the last-man-standing concept has been around in gaming since Bomberman in 1983. And the concept of battle royale in general was popularized with the Hunger Games and of course the film named Battle Royale. And, "battle royale" as a phrase was used by Ralph Ellison in 1952 in his classic novel Invisible Man, describing a free-for-all boxing match that the protagonist must participate in. So Brendan Greene didn't come up with this out of thin air, or at least he wasn't the first.
On the other hand, I see no problem with him trying to profit from it either.
Edit: I correct myself -- in Invisible Man, the phrase was "battle royal," not "battle royale." It's still clearly similar however.
[OFF-TOPIC] Katniss. <3
(From the Hunger Games books and movies: "Catnip" is how Gale used to call Katniss Everdeen. May the Odds be Ever in your Favour.)
This is a brand new podcast from Gimlet Media, where Alex Blumberg talk to people who have done hard things.
I've listened to the first four episodes, and I'm hooked. These episodes Alex talked to Andrew Mason (Groupon founder), Sophia Amoruso (Nasty Gal founder) and Nina Jacobson (Very Successful Movie Producer, of Hunger Games, Crazy Rich Asians etc fame).
They have all been very open and frank about their journey, and I found it really interesting to listen to them. So I thought this might also be interesting to the HN crowd. Recommended!
Me as well, and I definitely noticed that her role in "Hunger Games" was basically a young-adult dystopian scifi version of her role in "Winter's Bone" - and I feel her performance in both made each movie.
little trivia re Western: Hunger games is a remake of the Japanese movie Battle Royale based on the book by Japanese author :)
(but of course not arguing with Hunger Games movie itself as a very western movie with very western visuals, I understand what you mean)
Another thing, I’ve always wondered why some movies set in the future had such outlandish outfits and makeup. Think Hunger Games or Fifth element. Defeating or confusing facial or other biometric recognition would be a very good reason. But since it’s disguised as fashion it isn’t seen as sinister.
>Except, those things are purposely portrayed as bad.
Many lolicon manga do the same. Why is whether or not it is portrayed as bad the problem? Many are actually made interesting by portraying the siuation as morally ambiguous, such as in popular television shows.
>nowhere near as common and lustful as sexual and emotional abuse of individuals, young or not.
Why is that relevant?
>Normalization in causation to action requires that the actions already be happening and already be acceptable to some extent
Murder, violence, and war already happen, and war is acceptable (to most, though not I) - yet we have people who complain that violent videogames "normalise" violent beahviour. You haven't really provided evidence that (i) this "normalisation" is bad (beacuse this would be implying that it's bad for people to think or have opinions in a certain way) (ii) this "normalisation" has any effect upon the incidence of violent crimes, sexual or not.
>Again, distopian, which is very differnt from your own culture or beliefs.
Sherlock and House probably "normalises" drug use, even though it's set in present conditions. There are probably other examples of people doing bad things that are portrayed in media, but I'm not well versed enough in popular culture to give examples. I'm still not so sure why being dystopic has any effect or not. Would it follow that if lolicon TV/manga/art was set in a dystopic universe like the Hunger Games, it would be fine for you?
Or if the argument is based on being realistic, what is there to say of the many non-realistic things that happen in lolicon TV/manga/art, and indeed the unrealistic body proportions? Many, many anime are set with large towering robots controlled by little girls, for example.
Finally, many lolicon manga portray what is happening in a sad or twisted light, similar to how Breaking Bad shows Walt's activity, for example. There is one manga in which a girl is violently raped by a man claiming to check radiation levels in her house, for example. And this is of course ignoring the fact that many people are attracted to the material beacuse it is taboo in the first place, which is what's behind many kinks you or I would consider normal. As such, they don't want to make it real.
That sounds like sexism to me. If our culture demands that stories about men and women fit into gender roles then that is a sexist culture. It might not be the direct fault of authors, but we cannot just throw up our hands and say "well it is giving the people what they want".
It is also possible to misunderstand the market. Remember when people said that the reason why action movies didn't have female leads was because nobody would watch them? And then The Hunger Games and TFA were released?
Sure, you could read it that way - I only mentioned the Jurassic films to point out that they avoid getting bogged down in the specifics of genetic science.
There's no one 'correct' way to analyse a film's symbolism/ideology, not even the author's intention. Many films have been written to express one point of view and been interpreted a completely different way by the majority of the audience. An interesting example is the Hunger Games series of books and films. Left-wingers consider it a metaphor for plucky workers oppressed by selfish capitalists, right-wingers consider it a metaphor for decent country folk being oppressed by degenerate city-dwellers.
We can deal death out without bias such as physical strength or ability using weapons.
Two people enter two different boxes that contain a button each. Only one can leave because one of the boxes is a suicide box. They choose the box they enter to prevent systematic bias/corruption.
The purpose of this process isn't a boring version of The Hunger Games. It is to prevent the greater problem of civil conflict and ultimately save more lives.
It is a symbolic act, a ritual. There are actually many societies where a human or animal is blamed for a 'global' problem the tribe has, and then killed which removes the tension and the danger it created.
The most obvious example of this is Christianity. It involves a scapegoated individual being murdered in order for the tribe to reform itself, which although I am not a Christian, does seem to be a description of what happened.
The reverse process also occurs. When a leader like Arch Duke Ferdinand is assassinated, the event becomes a symbolic fulcrum through which human society demanded blood. Violence is like a chain reaction.
Here is a modern example. Bachir of Lebanon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachir_Gemayel
"On 14 September 1982, Bachir was addressing fellow Phalangists at their headquarters in Achrafieh for the last time as their leader and for the last time as commander of the Lebanese Forces. At 4:10 PM, a bomb was detonated at the headquarters, killing Bachir and 26 other Phalange politicians...
Habib Shartouni, a member of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party and also a Maronite Christian, was later arrested for the assassination. His sister was living in the apartment above the room Bachir was in. He had visited her the previous day and planted the bomb in her apartment. The next day, he called her and told her to get out of the building. Once she was out, he detonated the bomb from a few miles away from the building. When he came back to check on his sister, he was immediately arrested. He later confessed to it, saying he had done this because “Bachir had sold the country to Israel.” A reporter was heard telling him "You didn't kill a man, you killed a country." He was imprisoned for 8 years, until Syrian troops took over Lebanon at the end of the war and freed him on 13 October 1990..."
In my model the reporter understands something very important.
Had Habib Shartouni been ritually (which is another way of saying 'publicly orchestrated') killed, the anger could have found a resting place at his grave.
What happened next is illustrated in the remarkable anime Israeli film "Waltz with Bashir".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waltz_with_Bashir
"The Sabra and Shatila massacre was the killing of between 762 and 3,500 civilians, mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites, by a militia close to the Kataeb Party, also called Phalange, a predominantly Christian Lebanese right-wing party in the Sabra neighborhood and the adjacent Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon.
The massacre was presented as retaliation for the assassination of newly elected Lebanese president Bachir Gemayel, the leader of the Lebanese Kataeb Party."
So that is my position. Human society can use ritual as a social 'hack' to prevent a high blood price.
One obvious example is in the present with the increasing tensions in Europe due to the migrant/refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. While I do not condone violence I also believe the act of ritually killing (I won't mention anybody or anything specifically to avoid being controversial) would prevent (what I believe to be) much more exaggerated violence later on.
This would have to be done officially by the State and in the full public eye.
This is a strange subject, but it is only what we see of ourselves, we are strange animals. Many modern phenomenon, 9/11, Black Lives Matter are related to this subject.
Well, that is actually what a movie ticket costs here, and the obvious alternative has a way bigger selection for free. That is the competition. When I see the news how well blockbusters do in the movies, I think studios should just put up older titles for free. E.g for an upcoming Hunger Games you should just release the other parts and generate hype, turning home video from a direct money stream into pr.
This is an almost tautological position though. Films have a gender bias because society has a gender bias because, among other things, films have a gender bias. The reality is human beings have agency to make new things, dismantle previous stereotypes, and create an equal footing. Female action stars are not a concept that puts us at an impasse for creating gender equality (in fact, I'd argue with things like the Hunger Games, some of the marvel films, etc. the trend is to begin featuring women incrementally more in action films). I still haven't seen any evidence that gender stereotypes or prevalence of women are a causal factor in profitability, but even if that were the case I think we need to ask ourselves if that's a just position to take for defensibility.
I hope not either. But this is a popular model in videogames, and it somehow both pissess off players and earns the studios tons of money.
You obviously can't apply it to every movie, but you could appply it to quite a few. For instance, there's little point in extra content for Inception, because the movie world is defined by the start and the end of that very movie, and as you said, it has to make sense in its basic version. But consider things with already established franchises. I Disney would start publishing DLC sub-stories to the Force Awakens, I'm betting that every hardcore Star Wars fan would feel obliged to see them. The world portrayed in the movie is much bigger than the movie itself, and is has communities formed around it. To participate in the fandom, you need to be up to date with the canon. I'm pretty sure it could work with Marvel Cinematic Universe as well.
Then there are movies for which such a move would be a gamble. LotR and Hunger Games are franchises too, but I don't think they're strong enough to support DLC money-grab.
Anyway, enough suggesting ideas to them :). I absolutely hate DLCs. I just couldn't resist discussing the concept in the abstract.
Very sad to say but this old Star Wars fan was very disappointed with the movie. To me it looked cheap, with a poor rehashed plot. Very much the Hunger-games (permanently unhappy teenage girl) meets any film staring Danny Glover (out of place but racially correct actor who looks permanently shocked & breathless). And just how bad does Jedi training need be, so that you get beaten by a little girl who has never picked up a lightsaber before?
What made the original trilogy good is that it was something we didn't see before. Like Lightsabers, Deathstars, Blasters, Droids, Jedis, Siths, a whole lot of aliens, space ships with hyperspace.
It was Luke Skywaler going on a journey to become a Jedi Knight and find out what happened to his father.
The prequels were about Anakin Skywalker, but they wrote them more like a soap opera and added Jar Jar for comedic relief. It was about Anakin going from slave to Jedi Knight and then on to the dark side to become Darth Vader. It was about the fall of the Republic and the rise of The Empire. But for some reason it flopped due to holes in the plot and other stuff. It wasn't as well written as episodes 4, 5, 6.
In fact due to a lot of books and movies just recycling stuff, I got into writing books to come up with original stories and characters. But I come to find out people don't want original stuff they want the recycled stuff. So people who recycle other books into their own books get best sellers while mine don't sell. They even get made into movies. Hunger Games was a recycled Battleground from Japan. Harry Potter was a recycled King Arthur but a Wizard instead of a Knight.
So I guess this current generation wants recycled stories? While I myself want original stories.
There's no sense of ownership when I flick through and partially watch a dozen movies before settling on The Hunger Games on a boring Monday night.
I lived in Noisy-le-Grand for almost 5 years. Those buildings are really depressing. Some parts of the city are really dark and phantomatic at night, there is a lot of offices around and not much small local shops. They shot a few scenes from the movie Hunger Games there.
https://www.google.fr/maps/place/6+Place+des+F%C3%A9d%C3%A9r%C3%A9s,+93160+Noisy-le-Grand/
That's interesting, but we (as far as I know) weren't talking about game development, but about TV/movie production.
Most people don't realize it, but many recent high-budget movies were filmed in Georgia, e.g. Fast Five, Vacation, Ant-Man, all three Hunger Games movies, one of the recent X-Men movies, Flight, etc. After 2008, there was an abundance of empty warehouse space here available at deep discounts, not far from the highest volume airport in the world.
As the economy rebounded, momentum in that industry seems to have remained even though there aren't many empty/cheap warehouses here anymore. A few developers are even working on purpose-built movie studios around town now.
It has been interesting to watch, and certainly could parallel what could happen in the bay area if an exodus to somewhere like Austin began in earnest.
Glasses which become opaque when kissing love making scene pops up in Hunger games sequels, bcos some parents want those scenes to be censored out when they are watching the movie in theater with their young ones.
I wouldn't complain if the game wouldn't have male characters. What the game offers (after thirty seconds of google search [1]) is that you can play as different characters (there seem to be multiple males and multiples females), and all of them are prominent characters in the story (at least in the movie). As this isn't shoehorning something in, I can't see anything to complain about. There's legitimate reasons for including male characters and as there's already multiple females to choose from it's only logical to allow male options too.
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-hunger-games-panem-rising/id885877695?mt=8
That reminds me of something that happened at the movie theater when I went to see Hunger Games. There was a couple with a small child maybe 5 years old. They asked what Hunger Games was about and the employee said it was about a bunch of teenagers brutally killing each other for sport. The father, without flinching, said "as long as there's no sex we'll take 2 adults and one child ticket!"
I have been more entertained by watching Lars Anderson do archery for five minutes than any other archer on film, ever. Honestly, it was more entertaining and more memorable to me than any of the fake archery shown in the Hunger Games, Robin Hood or Lord of the Rings. I can't remember another archery video that went viral.
Perhaps some of the claims are a little hyperbolic and self congratulatory, but you can't say "all this guy is good at is marketing". Please. It obviously took practice and skill to perform some of those stunts and I just don't understand why dissenting voices always need to cut people down instead of just making their case.
One of the informative/funny things that came out of the Sony hack was that the studios themselves, at least at the lower rungs, are sick of the formulaic, Adam Sandler style movies as well. They just keep throwing money at it because they have no creativity. They cited 'The Hunger Games' as the type of stuff they should continue with; I think they just need more wider-read people in charge of the studios.
Actually, I'm getting tired of the dystopian future that I see everywhere in popular media. The only one that has even a hint of positivism is The Hunger Games.
Why can't we have movies with the joy of discovery? The thrill of exploration and invention? The future doesn't have to be bleak.
I think there are a couple of factors here. This is a popularity contest, which means it's mass-market by default. If you listed the "favorite artists" or "favorite songs" from Facebook, it would be similarly easily accessible pop music that can be played on the radio when children are in the room. The average person is going to like a lot of easily accessible books and a few outliers in specific genres. So while you might get 95% of people liking Harry Potter, you gets 15% liking the Mistborn series and maybe 12% liking Snow Crash and 4% liking The Martian. There is likely a long tail that Facebook won't show you.
So people like pop literature, which means pop literature is going to be written so the mass market can read and enjoy it. I've read quite a few books where I've said "I liked it up until..." or "I like it but this part annoys me". I can't say the same about Harry Potter or The Hunger Games. They're inoffensive and appeal to everyone (or at least the 95%).
Social factors also play into it, such as the appearance of The Holy Bible so high in the list. Is the Bible actually so many people's favorite book? No, of course not. That would be like saying my favorite book is Learn Python the Hard Way. It's a textbook, really, something to study and learn from. But it's a way to easily identify with a group. If you want people to know you're serious about your religion, you say the Bible is your favorite book. Another social aspect, The Great Gatsby is known at The Great American Novel and also a popular movie recently. Did this many people read it? No. They watched the movie or they heard it's a great book so they "like" it in order to appear smart and well-read. Nobody likes Hamlet as a book. No one. Because it's not a book. But you were probably forced to read it like one in high school, and it's one of the few books you've ever read, so let put it on the list too. In fact, I would say most of these books are on there because they're the some of the only books the 95% have ever read.
This was done satirically in an episode of Community (Season 5 MeowMeowBeanz). Where people interact with one another to gain "MeowMeowBeanz" a score, in a phone app.
Also within a 2 days society starts to look like something out of running man or hunger games.
This sounds like it comes straight from a movie. The Hunger Games, book 3 (no spoiler) mentions a bomb that goes off twice: once to kill the people, a second time to kill the people that have come to the aid of those injured. Now the video mentions doctors won't go near a place where a drone struck because drones do the same.
I can understand the logic, but no one using Popcorn time will credit the movie for being their own. No one thinks the star of Hunger Games was the developer of Popcorn Time, or the person pirating it, and no one is claiming as such.
Secondly, from my cursory glance, it seems as if T4P can/will easily spread malware, but this could just be fearmongering on Popcorn Time's end.
I sort of agree, believe it or not. At the same time, I must confess to harboring a dislike for polite civilized discourse in at least a couple circumstances.
The films in the Hunger Games series (especially the first) really nail something: the way barbarians hide behind polite rhetoric and noble behavior. The brilliance of things like the original punk movement -- and comedians since time immemorial -- has been to mock that, to discuss the piggish behavior of corrupt elite deviants in appropriately piggish language.
Condi's behavior in the 2000s I believe merits a little mockery for the upper-class rules of conduct that people like her hide behind.
Of course I've had a mild personal disdain for the trappings of polite society ever since I did a stint in business consulting and watched the way white collar sociopaths conduct themselves in the real world. I'd rather count myself among the trash, thank you very much.
Hunger Games.
I'm not really a book reader but I got hooked with the first movie and decided to read the books.
Not to trivialize his death, but I wonder what this means for the final Hunger Games film? He really was one of my all time favorite actors, shame he passed.
Looking on Amazon I can see action figures (not just the Barbie ones), stationary sets, board games, card games, jewelry (including some leather stuff which boys might like), bookmarks and if someone isn't doing a bow and arrow then the merchandising people are idiots.
Plus there are books and DVDs. Sure, some of it is going to be bought by girls but if you look at the action figures, they don't look like they're being marketed at girls.
Anecdotally, the kids down the road from me love Hunger Games and chief among them is the 14 year old boy. (He and I talk a lot about books and films - he's my cover for going to see rubbish superhero movies).
I think we as a group tend to underrate the power of marketing because it doesn't make s lot of analytical sense, but marketing is hugely important as anyone who had founded a business learns very, very quickly. This is just more anecdotal evidence, but the effect the hunger games movie/books have had on female enrollment in archery clubs is staggering: http://www.npr.org/2013/11/27/247379498/more-girls-target-archery-inspired-by-the-hunger-games
Here's another article that purports the rise (and now domination) of women in forensic biology to be predicated on the media's portrayal of the career and the large number of female role models in the field.
There is nothing special or innately "male" about video games, and I think the real thesis of the article is that player demographics are much more evenly split than we think; we just assume video games are for boys because the video games that girls play (candy crush, the Sims, etc) aren't marketed as being "video games" at all
'The _____ left behind' is a phrase with a well established meaning.
The poor parts of Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, as are well as parts of the Ozarks are 'The America Left Behind'. Recently they have been seized upon by the artistic elite and made hip by music like Mumford and Sons and movies like The Hunger Games.
The phrase means a subgroup that is not enjoying the prosperity that the rest of the group enjoys. To use the phrase, the author must believe the opposite of what you read.
This reminds me of a conversation I had about "Hunger Games". My friend mentioned how implausible it was that people in the future would want to watch people fight to the death for entertainment. To which I responded 'What do you think we are doing now? We are watching a movie about people fighting to the death for our entertainment.'
The problem here is merely a misunderstanding of career statistics. The statistics for success in academia are thoroughly against any one Ph.D. The competition is too high, the rewards are too low, and the competitors are too desperate. This is not a place where you wish to compete - unless you have some kind of overwhelming advantage - aka really, really brilliant - you know who you are.
For everyone else - look straight at industry - where the competition is a hell of a lot lower, the salaries much higher, and the competition is really not that bright. If you are getting a Ph.D - and you know you're not a genius - be looking at getting a cushy engineering job at a large firm.
The benefits are great, the salaries are great, the job security is great and you can always jump back into academia. It's also the closest analogue to academia as you'll get, next to research labs.
Don't ever compete on the same terms as the people around you. Don't play a game where you will lose - a game where you are probably outclassed. Go look to where you can charge monopoly pricing and extract as much as you possibly can.
Competing for limited resources is a losers game - hell, competition SUCKS BALLS (just ask any Chinese manufacturers you know :) - monopoly is where it's at (just ask AAPL/GOOG/MSFT/TSLA).
Separately - people should go out and learn some basic statistics, microeconomics (macro is pretty fucking useless), game theory and psychology. These will help you to avoid getting stuck in what can appropriately be called real life versions of the "Hunger Games" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_Games).
Reminds me of Tony Hsieh talking about poker strategies, and the conclusion of the movie WarGames:
> Through reading poker books and practicing by playing, I spent a lot of time learning about the best strategy to play once I was actually sitting down at a table. My big "ah-ha!" moment came when I finally learned that the game started even before I sat down in a seat.
In a poker room at a casino, there are usually many different choices of tables. Each table has different stakes, different players, and different dynamics that change as the players come and go, and as players get excited, upset, or tired.
I learned that the most important decision I could make was which table to sit at. This included knowing when to change tables. I learned from a book that an experienced player can make ten times as much money sitting at a table with nine mediocre players who are tired and have a lot of chips compared with sitting at a table with nine really good players who are focused and don't have that many chips in front of them.
In business, one of the most important decisions for an entrepreneur or a CEO to make is what business to be in. It doesn't matter how flawlessly a business is executed if it's the wrong business or if it's in too small a market.
Imagine if you were the most efficient manufacturer of seven-fingered gloves. You offer the best selection, the best service, and the best prices for seven-fingered gloves--but if there isn't a big enough market for what you sell, you won't get very far.
Or, if you decide to start a business that competes directly against really experienced competitors such as Wal-Mart by playing the same game they play (for example, trying to sell the same goods at lower prices), then chances are that you will go out of business.
In a poker room, I could only choose which table I wanted to sit at. But in business, I realized that I didn't have to sit at an existing table. I could define my own, or make the one that I was already at even bigger. (Or, just like in a poker room, I could always choose to change tables.)
I realized that, whatever the vision was for any business, there was always a bigger vision that could make the table bigger.
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tony-hsieh/tony-hsieh-zappos-ceo-del_b_589543.html
> Instead, Falken and David direct the computer to play tic-tac-toe against itself. This results in a long string of draws, forcing the computer to learn the concept of futility. Joshua obtains the missile code but before launching, it cycles through all the nuclear war scenarios it has devised, finding they too all result in stalemates. The computer concludes that nuclear warfare is "a strange game"; having discovered the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction ("WINNER: NONE"), therefore "the only winning move is not to play."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames
In summary:
Competition is M.A.D. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction), the only winning move is not to play!
And long live monopoly!
All due to piracy? If you look at the 10 top grossing films of 2012, we have: 3 comic book movies (The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, and The Amazing Spiderman) where the characters have already had several movies, 3 movies that are either the 3rd or 4th in an original series (Madagascar, Ice Age, and MiB), and 4 based on books (Twilight, Skyfall, The Hobbit, and Hunger Games). Maybe people are tired of rehashes of the same IP over and over again, especially when they spread one story over several movies, just to get more money out of you? (I'm looking at you, The Hobbit)
Mostly scifi and fantasy. I've never been much of a reader, so I'm trying to catch up on classics.
* Hunger games 1-3 -- not bad, would probably recommend
* Hitchiker's guide to the galaxy -- good, surprised how short it was. really liked the style of writing, fun to read. recommended
* Stranger in a Strange Land -- currently reading this one, interesting, but nothing ground breaking. one character seems to dominate the book. don't know if I'd recommend.
* Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep -- interesting, a bit boring. I kept comparing it to the movie, and in the end I like the movie better. they each focus on different subjects, but I like the movie's subject better, and it felt more professional/solid. would recommend.
* Ringworld -- pretty good. the 'Teela problem' is fascinating to me and got me thinking a lot outside of reading, which to me is a sign of a good book. the 'spacey stuff' in the book was not that great. even the ringworld itself was not that interesting. would recommend.
* The Mote in God's Eye -- my favorite book of the year. so much to think about (moral problems/dilemmas). the realistic part of the space travel was new to me (like the consideration of g-forces in constant acceleration), and so that was more to think about. definitely recommend.
* Cryptonomicon -- a close second. Neal Stephenson goes into wicked detail in his books and always blows my mind (never heard of Van Eck Phreaking before this book, how is that possible?). definitely recommend.
The interesting thing about black/gray markets is that they crop up when demand isn't otherwise being met. So yeah, the Avengers gets pirated for one of two reasons:
1) It's not available where people want to watch it
2) It's not available for a price they want to pay
It's a fascinating problem, really. I doubt movie studios will ever be able to meet the "free" demand, but piracy in general has put all sorts of pressure on them to get movies into peoples' hands quicker. The Hunger Games was a huge hit and will be on BluRay within about 5 months of its theatrical release. It'll be out on iTunes at the same time.
Historically, this is a vast improvement. Titanic took about 10 months to go from theater to VHS. This was back in the day when places like Blockbuster had exclusive rental windows for a while too, so it was more like a year before non-pirates could purchase it for home use.
If people could reliably pirate high fidelity copies of movies between the theater and DVD releases, I suspect that timing would shrink even further.
In the hunger games (good movie btw) there are windows that also function as screens. So the main character is looking out at this huge cityscape and suddenly the window turns into a screen with somebody video-calling her. I thought that was pretty cool.
It's posts and comments like these where I so miss the down vote click.
There's not even a hint of irony.
It's all about the 'entertainment' value.
Am I seeing a remake of the book/movie 'Hunger Games'?
"Oh Nigel, do kindly pass me two of your Entertainment cards. You'll get a treat if you do..."
Indeed. Writing a book creates a passive income stream. Much like a blog with ads. It's arguable it's not completely passive, you can/should do promo - but equally you may want to do SEO on a blog.
The Hunger Games trilogy will be getting a lot of sales now, since the movie has been released and it did well on Amazon. The first book is 4 years old though, plenty of books pay off after the initial release.
I do a great deal of work with youth marketing so I have a slightly different perspective. I can't speak to music -- but films cost a great deal of money to make, and YouTube videos just won't replace that.
If you look at the next generation of consumers (kids) they're watching more broadcast television than any other demographic, they're camping out overnight to see films like the Hunger Games and this may surprise you ancient twentysomethings but these kids are actually paying for their music too. This is why Katy and Gaga are making real money, but more sophisticated music aimed at young adults isn't doing well.
The biggest mistake that techies make is that they assume that their lives are the lives that everyone else leads: And this just isn't the case. Are kids spending tons of time looking at YouTube? Yes! But they're also spending hours looking at the Disney channel too and paying for songs on iTunes with that gift card that grandma got them for their birthday.
Will the film and music companies go through a great deal of disruption? Very much so — but they won't be replaced by tech companies, unless those are videogame companies. The only way that tech companies will disrupt Hollywood is if they get into producing content - so far the only examples of this is Steve Jobs taking over Pixar to make films and Sony with their valuable music and film business.
I just see a Hollywood that ran out of ideas a long time ago and is desperate for a fresh story. The big movie pushes I've seen this year are John Carter, based on a character that first appeared a hundred years ago, and the Hunger Games, based on a book series that first appeared less than four years ago. Then I see a new Three Stooges film coming out that, among other crazy things, features an appearance of several Jersey Shore cast members. Many other big budget films this year are sequels: Wrath of the Titans, The Avengers, Men In Black 3, etc.
And here, Prufrock451 is a lucky one. Hollywood is starving for ideas, but even when innovative writers come up with a good idea, Hollywood prefers to go with established money-makers and often red-lights obscure ideas. I think they're so willing to go with Prufrock451's story because it got so popular on reddit. There's lower risk. They see that this story can attract a lot of eyeballs, and are hoping that those eyeballs will translate to box office success.
Hollywood likes to blame its decline on pirating, but in reality there are very few new ideas coming out of Hollywood anymore, and they expect to make money repackaging old ideas, putting them in 3D and charging a premium. Hopefully stories like Prufrock451's become more common and we get to see more original ideas make it to the big screen. I certainly don't want to see more movies with the old stooges and the new Jersey stooges.
I would say its more brutal. The violence depicted in hunger games is distant and somewhat clinical - almost as though it was written with the possibility of future film rights. In Enders game, other children are beaten to death in a quite personal manner. I recall being quite effected by the deaths in Enders game. I don't recall any similar explicit imagery in hunger games.