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The Spy Who Bored Me

By Andrew on January 26th, 2012

Here’s my latest “news” piece written for the newspaper. I say “news” because it’s not, strictly speaking, news. Rather, it’s an editorial dressed up with certain trappings of news writing. Sure, I consulted a source and slipped in quotes from him here and there, but the goal of this particular article wasn’t so much to report on something as it was to put forward an argument. I’ll go into greater detail about this subject in a day or two (hopefully), since I’ve recently been reflecting on the tenets of news writing, I suppose you could say.
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Anyway, the original title and subheadline were “Tinker Sailor Solider Spy” and “Potential leak of Canadian government secrets could ‘result in pretty frosty international relations,’ says Prof Wesley Wark.” But I really don’t like those choices, if I’m honest. The title puns off a piece of espionage fiction I would hardly regard widely known, with half of it not really making any sense. As for the subheadline, using a quote from my source creates the expectation of a news piece, which it most certainly is not. Once the reader gets to the second paragraph, they’re going to realize that something feels off, having gone into it with the wrong impression.
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Since I approached this as an editorial (and that’s certainly what it feels like to me), my headline and subheadline would have been “The Spy Who Bored Me” (which puns off arguably better known espionage fiction) and “Recent Canadian spy caper mired in pathos for lack of anything substantial to anchor it.” These titles strike me as being far more punchy and frame both the angle and tone of the piece better. Therein lies the problem, I suppose. They chose news headlines for an editorial voice. But there’s more to it than that. Again, I’ll save it for a day or two.

The Spy Who Bored Me

Recent Canadian spy caper mired in pathos for lack of anything substantial to anchor it
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On the evening of November 14, 2006, a Russian agent who called himself Paul William Hampel was arrested at Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport. In his possession were the iconic hallmarks of globetrotting espionage; forged papers, thousands of dollars in various currencies, a shortwave radio, and multiple cellphones with password-protected SIM cards.

The story of Canadian naval intelligence officer Jeffrey Delisle, however, does not seem quite so glamourous. Accused of selling secrets over the weekend of January 14, our very own international man of mystery doesn’t seem to have enjoyed smoky cafés on cobbled European streets or caches of foreign banknotes and doctored passports. After his arrest by the RCMP at his suburban Halifax home, merely his charge and a trickle of his domestic details have emerged in lieu of any concrete answers.

“He worked at a communications hub in Halifax called HMCS Trinity,” said Wesley Wark, professor at the Munk Centre for International Studies, of the few facts known thus far. “He also spent some time in the office of the Chief of Defence Intelligence in Ottawa, so he’s someone who over the course of his career has had access to a lot of sensitive Canadian–and probably Allied–information.”

What exactly this sensitive information is has caused widespread speculation since the story broke nearly two weeks ago. “It may be that the government doesn’t know the exact details of what he had access to,” continued Wark. “We don’t have a job description for him, we don’t know what he gave away. But whatever it was, it’s something that the Canadian government regards as very damaging.”

The fragmentary nature of the evidence has created a contrast rather curious in a public eye typically more interested in the romance of espionage than in stuffy procedure. The Russian spy ring exposed in New York 18 months ago touted its very own Bond girl in Anna Chapman (born Anna Kushchyenko), and it recently came to light that the Brits bugged a Moscow street with a glorified pebble seemingly willed from the fictional Q Branch in early 2006.

But Delisle is neither a femme fatale nor a crafty piece of future tech. He is a troubled man, once bankrupt and now divorced, with custody of three children. Bereft of fantasy, what is there to do beyond search for the truth? Delisle’s case is a humanly tragic spy caper, one the media has mired in pathos for lack of anything substantial to anchor it.

“We’re all speculating about what he could have had access to and what he might have sold,” Wark said, mindful that “lots of mysteries still surround the case.” Despite many outlets, including both The National Post and The Toronto Star, eyeing Russia as the “foreign entity” with which Delisle was sharing secrets, Wark is keen to note that it “has been confirmed neither by the Canadian government nor by the Russian government.”

While what little truth known of Delisle’s alleged espionage may not quite be stranger than fiction, his charge will nevertheless have considerable repercussions. “[This case] is going to test The Security of Information Act—legislation which has never been used since it was passed in 2001—so there are legal issues of potentially great significance depending on how the legislation stacks up in the court process,” Wark added.

As regards Canada’s international relations, Wark believes there is going to be “some period of friction between a government that has been spied on and the government doing the spying.” More troublesome is how Canada has many secrets that are not necessarily made in Canada. “If some of that material leaks out, then our allies are going to be very concerned about what it is exactly that Paul Delisle gave away and how this could happen,” Wark cautioned.

Although the facts may presently be few and far between, there is nevertheless hope that all will be revealed. “A lot is bound to emerge once this case is in court because there’s a fair trial process that has to take place,” Wark concluded. “The government loses control of the secrets of this case, and it becomes a matter of the courts to decide what’s in the public’s interest to know.” Fortunately for us, courts tend to recognize such pervasive public interest, and government claims for secrecy are often stretched.

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Liberals launch Ontario tuition grant

By Andrew on January 13th, 2012

Hopefully the impressive turnout at yesterday’s first open writer’s meeting of the new year will lead to a more diverse variety of contributors to the newspaper in the coming weeks. It’s been three years since the last truly packed open meeting, and I’m more than happy to see ledes go out to more than just the same five or six people week after week. I think I’ve written more for the paper this year than the last two years combined, and that goes without considering the odds and ends I do on the side (puzzles, website, copy editing, etc.). If I can spend the time I normally devote to churning out a news piece week after week to doing well in class, there may yet be hope for graduate school after all.
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Speaking of class, last semester’s Latin Prose term paper debacle still hasn’t been resolved. In fact the fall semester went so poorly that I still haven’t checked my grades, and I really dread what they’ll end up being. Fortunately, winter semesters have traditionally been better for me, a trend which seems poised to continue. I only have two essays to forge/cleverly synthesize and present as my own work write, and the overall work load appears to be fairly light. Without getting too cocky, Method and Theory in Classics should be a bird course, my professor in Latin Historians is sympathetic to the fact that my Wednesday evening obligations may often interfere with his Thursday morning class, Latin Drama is all Plautus and Terence with one of my favourite professors, and my Latin Composition professor casually uses words like “wanker” and other derivations of such. Remarkably, I’m still enthusiastic about going to class the first week after getting back from holidays. Isn’t it amazing what good professors teaching (mostly) interesting courses can do for a student’s eagerness?
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At any rate, my first contribution to the newspaper this semester is a news story on the recently announced tuition rebate. It’s posted below and is also available on the newspaper‘s website through the link in the headline.
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Liberals launch Ontario tuition grant

Half of Ontario’s undergraduates eligible to receive 30 per cent tuition rebate

Starting this month, many undergraduate students pursuing post-secondary education in Ontario can look forward to a 30 per cent tuition rebate. The new program, a core component of the Liberal campaign platform and spearheaded by “education premier” Dalton McGuinty, will be available to roughly half of the province’s undergraduates.

“This is permanent,” said Glen Murray, Ontario Minister of Training, Colleges, and Universities, in a teleconference to student media groups province-wide this past Friday. “As long as you’re a student, you’re in the program.”

Those eligible for the tuition rebate must be within four years of having completed high school, enrolled in full-time programs, and from households with a gross income of less than $160,000 annually. Part-time, graduate, and international students, however, will not be receiving the grant, exclusions which have caused some backlash.

The Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario has claimed that the $423-million funding the rebate could have been better spent slashing tuition fees for all. “They (CFS-Ontario) have taken a very different approach than any of the other student associations, and they change their mind all the time,” Murray said in response to criticisms from Canada’s largest student organization. “During the election it was a (tuition) freeze, after the election it was a 12 per cent cut. Every time we’ve turned around and done something, the glass is always half empty for them, and they change their position from month to month.”

When asked about the reasons behind these exclusions, Murray cited the immediate pressures of the rising number of students entering colleges and universities year after year. “We had 100,000 more students go to college and university this past academic year than we did the year before,” he said. “That’s more entering the system than during the double cohort year (which occurred in 2003 when the province eliminated grade 13 and thereby dramatically increased the graduating secondary school students that year).”

Murray went on to explain how the grant was designed to help students with their first four years of university, and how a post-secondary education is necessary to prevent being at a disadvantage in the future. “70 per cent of jobs out there require college or university education,” Murray claimed.

Opponents from PC and NDP camps similarly malign the grant for its limited benefit to only some 310,000 of an estimated 600,000 – 700,000 students, the $423-million hit to a province attempting to balance a $16-billion deficit, and the elimination of other funding initiatives. Both the Queen Elizabeth II Award and The Ontario Textbook and Technology Grant are being phased out to accommodate the tuition rebate, leading to accusations of a mere ‘bait and switch.’

“There was a ‘bait and switch’ here: we’re switching a minnow for a whale!” Murray joked. “We’re phasing out very small programs that were very expensive to administer, and we’re taking those same staff to administer the new, much larger programs. You’ve got to keep retooling government to make sure that, as you improve programs, you’re getting rid of ones that are no longer effective.”

Undergraduates receiving OSAP are automatically considered and will receive a direct deposit if eligible. All other undergraduates must apply online and reconfirm for every year in which they qualify for the grant. University students will receive $800 this semester while college students will receive $365. Come September, the respective rebates will be $1,600 and $730 annually, and students will continue to receive the grant until their fourth year of study.

Though Murray playfully trusts the “brilliant, editorial, journalistic genius of student newspapers” to get the message out, he promises the province will advertise the rebate “by absolutely every way possible,” including on campus representation and social media outreach.

For more information and to apply for your rebate, click here.

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10 for the Twitter age.

By Andrew on December 30th, 2011

Here are 10 games I played in 2011. Like this blurb, each is fewer than 140 characters. Honestly, who has the patience for a detailed list?

Minecraft: An endlessly amusing world of possibility and a brilliant example of emergent storytelling.

VVVVVV: The most thorough exploration of a single mechanic presented with charming design and masterfully arranged music.

Team Fortress 2: While you spend +$60 on Call of Duty every November, TF2 has been thriving for over four years and is now free to play.

Atom Zombie Smasher: Excellent strategy mechanics depict a losing war against the zombie hordes in 1960′s Neuvos Aires.

Gravity Bone: The single most thoughtful exploration/deconstruction of first person game design, built from a Quake II mod.

Fallout: New Vegas: Far from perfect, but the Mojave Wasteland with its various characters and factions is a truly immersive place.

Portal 2: Doubtlessly the sharpest writing I’ve yet experienced in a video game. Perhaps even the most clever one, too.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution: Not since Bioshock has a world been infused with as many fascinating themes and ideas.

Persona 2: Innocent Sin: Truly a relic from another era. A game so mechanically awful it makes you amazed we ever played games like it.

Keyboard Drumset Fucking Werewolf: It’s not just indie; it’s underground. A coarse,visceral, genre-blurring interactive music video.

140 character addendum: These are just the games I played in 2011. Not games released in 2011, and not games I claim are the best of 2011.

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Deus Ex: Human Revolution

By Andrew on December 30th, 2011

Here’s something I wrote last week for a magazine project I’m currently spearheading. There’ll hopefully be more on this later as it seems to have stalled temporarily, but I’m posting it now because a) I haven’t done anything else noteworthy, and b) I should probably bury the academic diatribe that was my most recent posting.

Playing God

Technology enables mankind to accomplish wonderful things, but at what cost? A thematic exploration of Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Adam Jensen is not human. Having nearly been killed in a terrorist attack on Sarif Industries, the company for which he is the head of security, his life could only be saved through transhuman augmentation. His arms were amputated and replaced with cybernetic limbs. His head has been equipped with various neural implants and ocular improvements. He is able to jump higher and sprint faster than any human can. Even his intellectual faculties have been mechanically increased thanks to the technological wonders of the not too distant future.

Yet for all of these upgrades, Adam Jensen is not a machine either. He has thoughts and ideas. He can be creative and he can express human emotion. When he feels anger, he raises his voice. When he is annoyed, he becomes sarcastic and dismissive. When he is overwhelmed, his speech assumes the inflections and irregularities expected of someone in anguish. Although he may now be as susceptible to software viruses as he is to the common cold, he is driven by revenge and not by programming.

Adam Jensen blurs the line of what it means to be human. While the common question the unending forward march of technology often asks is when artificial intelligence will rival the human intellect, Deus Ex: Human Revolution asks at what point a person loses their humanity through technology. With all of his implants and augmentations shattering the limits of his natural potential, is Adam Jensen still human? Is he something more? Something less?

This is the question which frames the world of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. In the year 2027, Sarif Industries is on the verge of a technological breakthrough which will revolutionize human potential. Pharmaceutical giants have already been playing god with the human genome for years, but the results are less than ideal. The human body often rejects drastic augmentation, and the necessary corrective procedures and medication can enslave families to corporations for life. This innovation is poised to upset the current ethically nebulous balance of the world. Sarif believes that everyone should have the opportunity to become better than human. Pro humanity movements such as Purity First believe that mankind should not play God. Other shadowy corporations in competition with Sarif are pursuing their own agendas with private military operations. Adam Jensen is caught in the middle.

Many videogames are concerned with telling a story, but so few of them are interested in exploring a theme. Deus Ex: Human Revolution is one of these games; the theme of not just what it means to be human, but what the influence of technology means for our souls. For Sarif, himself a devout futurist with a cybernetic arm, there is no cost too great in the pursuit of technological advancement. The work of his company has the power to improve human potential universally. Though he may be involved in shadowy military contracts to pay the bills, the public face of his company balances the ethical scales by championing the right for every citizen to reap the benefits of his life improving work.

Regardless, part of the wider world views Sarif and those of similar inclinations as if they were false prophets, having become gods on earth from the marvellous machines they have created. This central conflict gives the title of the game weight beyond curious colloquial clumsiness. The popular phrase is Deus Ex Machina (pronounce each syllable and the the “ch” as a “k”), the Latin rendering of an Ancient Greek idiom rooted in classical theatre. A deity would be hoisted above the stage by a crane or other such device in order to resolve the action with their godly powers, a technique modern audiences tend to recognize as egregious contrivance. Sarif has become a god thanks to his technology, an allegory perhaps none too subtly extended to Adam himself; less because he is the first man and more because Sarif did not save his life nearly as much as he constructed him from nothing.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution grounds these lofty ideas in moments where Adam is free to explore the rough outlines of an open world, generally consisting of less than one single square kilometre of streets, buildings, and sewers. From a narrative perspective these areas are shams, dotted with meaningless side-quests whose only gratification are experience points and which mostly distract from the overarching storyline. Perhaps this is no different from the side-quests in most open world games, but Deus Ex: Human Revolution is fundamentally linear. The story only develops in straightforward missions taking place outside of its tiny sandboxes, not within them.

Why, then, would its developers bother with devoting such time and energy into crafting cheap facsimiles of an open world? Surely it would have been better to invest those resources in refining its core elements, improving its brazenly broken boss fights, or fleshing out its resolution to be more than just a multiple-choice question?

In defence, perhaps Deus Ex: Human Revolution sought to capitalize upon the singular ability of videogames to offer audience directed thematic exploration. If a book or a movie decides to examine an idea, ultimately its participants only receive the ideas its creator intended with anything beyond being a textual leap of faith. In a video game, a theme can be presented and explored through the devices and structures central to its progression in the manner of literature or film, while the potential exists for further consideration beyond the ostensible. For over four years, Bioshock has been the gold standard of this possibility. Its players receive its core philosophies and ideologies through the narrative and mechanics central to the game, which can further be reinforced and explored by taking the time to consider the propaganda posters and advertisements lining the walls, to name but a single example.

In this light, the narratively empty and inconsequential sandboxes of Deus Ex: Human Revolution take on greater thematic resonance. What better way to be exposed to the ideas than to discover them yourself? Adam doesn’t necessarily need to hear the word on the streets as he reacquaints himself with the world from which he’s been absent for six months in recovery, but moments like these colour the world and help the player realize that transhumanism may not necessarily be as entirely altruistic as Sarif thinks. Only the privileged can afford to play with the technological toys able to improve their natural abilities, while the impoverished and lower classes feel increasingly inadequate and insignificant in being unable to compete with their augmented aristocracy. As William Gibson once said, “the future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.”

Without these occasional glimpses, the player would have no awareness of the broader social issues at play, or rather no impetus to consider them. The people populating the linear game are mostly terrorists, mercenaries, cops, scientists, and the occasional significant figurehead, all of whom are presented in isolation from the wider world. Without the consideration of how the blue-collar and those beneath them are affected by Adam’s activities, the ideas of Deus Ex: Human Revolution become polarized and dull. Social struggles and philosophical quandaries are more engaging than corporate power plays because they have universal appeal. Or rather, the question of whether or not it is a good thing to play god with technology has far more weight when you can see its effects on a human scale.

I’ll admit, before playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I thought it was ridiculous to consider that futurism and the potential of technological innovation could be anything other than unerringly beneficial, as if it should be nothing less than a moral imperative. But the possibilities in boundless technology to fracture the world by sharper divisions in not just wealth and social status but also by natural ability do raise some fascinating issues.

However it must be said that Deus Ex: Human Revolution explores the ethics of augmentation better than it does the morals of it. The game makes an attempt to test the corrupting influence of seemingly absolute power on the actions of the player, but having been conditioned to view morality in the medium as strictly black and white, most players would likely equate non-lethal stealthy pacifism with good and guns blazing frontal assaults with evil immediately. Admittedly, it’s difficult to gauge just how sophisticated this mechanic is as my Adam seldom had his sneaky humanitarian approach acknowledged. But when the ending cinematic rhetorically asks how easy it would have been for him to abuse his augmented abilities, the question swiftly devolves into the trite “might is right” argument.

Yet while I doubt that “might is right” is the intended philosophical focal point for a game with as many intriguing ideas as Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I do see a certain elegance to its conspicuous inclusion in any outcome of the four ending sequences. Many of its ideas are adapted from classical thinking, the foundations of which are a mythology built on the principle that the most powerful deserve the most authority, as exemplified by Zeus and the Olympians forcefully overthrowing the previous generation of gods. Even the man directly responsible for the condition of this fictional earth in 2027 fancies himself a modern Daedalus as he watches the manifestation of his genius threaten to tear the world apart.

There are many ways the conversation can go when Adam meets this man and asks him what right he has to do what he has done, with every result offering a distinct justification for the way he has chosen to exercise his might. But whether through persuasion or otherwise, absolute power soon falls to Adam, and the player can decide how they wish to exercise their own will. The room of four endings may disappoint our gameplay expectations, but its thematically more powerful.

Gods do not labour, they need only will their whims into existence and the world is shaped accordingly.

After all, Adam Jensen is neither a man nor a machine. He has become a god.
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The strangest compliment

By Andrew on December 21st, 2011

“How do you know what you know?”

I have a cough. Not in itself too big of a deal, but the fact that it’s the most violent and persistent cough I’ve ever had is especially inconvenient. For the last few days I’ve been having a half dozen or so little naps throughout the night instead of a solid chunk of sleep. And during my exams I had to leave the room more than a few times just to clear my throat and keep my lungs in my chest and off of my test paper. I’m quite confident I’ve diseased the entire Classics department at U of T, over which I might normally be regretful if it hadn’t been causing such trouble for me recently.

Yes, as if it weren’t bad enough that this has been the most execrable undergraduate semester I’ve yet had, the bloody thing still isn’t over. My term paper for Latin Prose Authors (in which we read the first four books of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and the first third of his Apologia) has set off the plagiarism alarms in my professor. Due to my inconsistent attendance and performance throughout his course, he doesn’t believe that I’m capable of the paper I wrote, claiming that it’s “too scholarly” and “suspiciously good,” and that the writing itself has a graduate student degree of confidence.

Naturally, I was flattered. While I’m not too crazy about the paper I wrote (most of it was fluff and I thought that my arguments were textual leaps of faith and insufficiently presented), it’s nice to be recognized as a talented writer. In fact it’s even quite ironic how he praises the confidence of my writing when I don’t view myself as a confident writer at all, such that I genuinely thought he wanted to speak with me about my paper because it was so bad and not because it was so good. I can’t decide whether or not this means I should stop writing my papers the night before they’re due with a bottle of scotch at hand.

At any rate, he had three major concerns, two of which were easily dispatched (how do I know so much about my topic, and how am I able to write so well?) while the third is causing my present troubles.

The subject of my essay is essentially a character comparison between a minor character in the Metamorphoses and a major character in the Aulularia (The Pot of Gold), a comedy by Plautus. I’ve taken courses on both Apuleius and ancient drama before and done rigourous studies of Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, and Terence. So while I do know more about the subject than most undergraduates/classicists, I agree that demonstrating such knowledge might be suspicious to a professor who is unfamiliar with my particular interests. Fair enough. I explained my history with such material and told him that I’m contemplating a focus on ancient drama and ancient comedy should I ever commit myself to graduate school.

As for my writing abilities, I explained my leisure pursuits as an amateur writer/journalist to him. Working and writing for campus media for more than three years, editing pieces and developing other writers, how my dedication to the newspaper directly interfered with his course when I’m up all night Wednesday helping to put out an issue which meant I’d show up to his Thursday morning class without having slept, etc. “Oh, so you’re a practised writer…” he said as if to renege on his earlier words of praise.

While these explanations seemed to have convinced him, he still had to bring this charge of academic misconduct to the attention of the department chair, the reason being that his academic integrity is also now involved. Whether or not I wrote the paper and know what I know about the topic is now not the major issue; it’s the third concern regarding the possibility of intellectual theft.

Unfortunately, my paper bears such similarity to another piece of scholarship (which I’m aware of and skimmed over in the most basic act of preliminary research) that, in the opinion of not just my professor and the department chair but also to any classicist who read that scholarship and my paper side by side, it would be “a colossal coincidence” for my paper not be a “synthesis” of the existing scholarship. This is the headache. After speaking with the department chair on Monday afternoon, coughing constantly and likely with the faint hint of soothing scotch masked by Altoid peppermints on my viral breath, I learn that the possible academic offence I committed was purloining the ideas of another and presenting them as my own; that my paper does not contain my ideas which I developed myself.

In short, I’m screwed. How the hell am I supposed to argue that my ideas are my own? How the hell can I be charged with stealing ideas, not through simple “copy/paste” but through cleverly insidious “synthesis”? It seems like my only hope is the realization that it would be impossible for them to prove what they’re accusing my of having done, as much as it would be impossible for me to disprove it. Which I don’t say to suggest that I’m admitting academic misconduct while reveling in how I got away with it, but rather that the legitimacy of my high calibre writing is being doubted on coincidence, “colossal” or otherwise. It’s my essay, dammit, and I developed the ideas I put forth! In fact I’m disgusted with myself for even considering that I should just say, “yeah, whatever, I did what you think I did, so give me an F and let’s save us all some time…” as if it’s somehow my fault that my good work on a meagre 10% assignment has created this much inconvenience.

And for what? Because I freely admit in the interest of full disclosure to having glanced at the article from which they think I stole? What about my other voluntary admissions that the impact of that scholarship was so minimal that I didn’t even pay attention to who wrote it until I was made aware of this charge and was compelled to retrace my browser clicks and have a look? Or that most of that scholarship wasn’t even available to me because it appeared as a Google Book result with most of the pages cut out; that the only reason I did this most cursory amount of research was so that I would feel confident in the knowledge that this is a topic worth pursuing if others have gone there before? Or that most significantly I obviously would’ve made mention of utilizing this scholarship in a bibliography had I felt that it made any contribution whatsoever to the development of my essay and ideas?

If in that essay I made use of ideas not my entirely my own, surely those ideas came from professors in past courses I took on the subject, courses which are responsible for my current knowledge yet from which professors I’m not being accused of intellectual theft. The ideas of those courses and professors were far more influential than that scholarship and likewise went unattributed in my essay, yet that’s not the charge.

This is infuriating. Regrettably nothing more can be done until January since the university is now closed for the holidays, and I was really rather hoping that it would all be over Monday afternoon. In the mean time, this academically miserable semester drags on.