Category: The Conversation – Canada

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Afsoon Soudi, Assistant Professor, RTA school of Media, Toronto Metropolitan University

Many writers, actors and other creatives are currently experiencing a small wave of panic about artificial intelligence (AI) taking over their jobs.

Generative AI (GenAI) is making machine learning and creative work more accessible to everyone. But for industry professionals, the rise of generative AI can signal the destruction of creative jobs.

Yet, according to a recent report by the World Economic Forum, AI will create more jobs in the next five years than it will displace.

We are four scholars in different creative industries hoping to explore educational approaches to AI. We want to help prepare the next generation to innovate within human-AI collaborative frameworks. To do this, we have begun to confer with other creative professionals through an online survey.

What if AI can actually support human creativity and productivity? Can we use these technologies to our advantage? What we can expect for the future?

We believe creative professionals can harness new technologies while still upholding their foundational creative and ethical principles.

How AI is being used in creative sectors

AI is becoming deeply embedded within the operational workflows of creative industries, from a nascent concept to an integrated reality.

Media and creative workers have gone on strike to protest the use of AI, sparking important conversations. For example, Screenwriters in Hollywood and the Writers’ Union of Canada have raised concerns and helped shape new policies around AI and creative work.

Within media production, large language models (LLMs) can facilitate the rapid prototyping of narrative concepts, scripts and audiovisual materials, while automated editing platforms and AI-driven visual effects create massive efficiency gains in post-production. This technological integration allows creators to shift their focus from laborious manual tasks to higher-level creative refinement.

In graphic communication and packaging, AI and machine learning are acknowledged drivers of change. AI can enhance processes from ideation to production logistics like sorting and personalized web-to-print platforms. In the realm of Digital Asset Management, AI is instrumental in improving asset discoverability and utility through automated metadata tagging and sophisticated image recognition.

Journalism is also undergoing a significant transformation. AI has been used for a while now to analyze large datasets for investigative reporting, but LLMs now routinely streamline article summarization. More advanced applications are emerging: AI systems are designed to identify news values and auto-generate articles from live events. Major news organizations like the Financial Times and The New York Times are already deploying AI tools in their newsrooms.

Ethical challenges

The integration of AI is not without considerable challenges.

The generation of fabricated information and non-existent sources are documented failures. These examples highlight critical issues with accuracy and reliability.

Many people have said they do not fully understand the extent to which AI is incorporated into their standard software. This disparity between deployment and user consciousness underscores the subtle yet pervasive nature of AI’s integration. This points to an urgent need for greater transparency and digital literacy.

Bias and intellectual property

Models trained on vast, uncurated internet data often replicate and amplify existing societal biases. For example, studies demonstrate persistent issues such as anti-Muslim bias in LLMs.

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Read more:
Artificial intelligence can discriminate on the basis of race and gender, and also age

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At the same time, urgent ethical and legal questions regarding intellectual property have emerged. The training of LLMs on copyrighted content without compensation has created significant friction. For example, the pending New York Times litigation against OpenAI highlights unresolved issues of fair use and remuneration for creative work.

Conversely, GenAI demonstrates considerable potential to democratize creative production. These tools, by lowering technical barriers and automating complex processes, can provide access to individuals and groups historically excluded from creative fields due to resource or educational constraints.

Specific applications are already enhancing media accessibility, such as AI-powered tools that automatically generate alt text for images and subtitles for video content.

Navigating this dual-use landscape necessitates the adoption of robust governance frameworks. Fostering industry-wide equity, diversity and innovation education is essential to mitigate risks while harnessing GenAI’s potential for an inclusive creative ecosystem.

Labour and skill evolution

Technological revolutions have historically catalyzed significant transformations in creative labour markets and GenAI represents the latest disruptive force.

The proliferation of GenAI has once again reshaped the creative industries, demanding new professional competencies.

Human creativity and intervention are indispensable, providing cultural and contextual accuracy. Humans must also review AI-generated content for quality and inclusivity.

In response to this shift, higher education institutions need to recalibrate curricula from tool-specific training towards fostering curiosity, ethical reasoning and AI literacy.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Is AI coming for your creative job? Maybe not – with some human intervention – https://theconversation.com/is-ai-coming-for-your-creative-job-maybe-not-with-some-human-intervention-252796

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Jerit Leo Mitchell, Physics PhD Candidate, University of Regina

Despite the fact that much of the current research in paleontology focuses on trying to find traces of organic remains in fossils, dinosaur DNA has unfortunately never been recovered.

A lot of what we know about dinosaurs comes from preserved bones and teeth that are dug out of the ground. These hard tissues alone, however, are limited in the information they provide.

Soft tissues are extremely rare in the fossil record, but can help provide a much more life-like reconstruction of ancient life. This includes things like muscles and ligaments, pigments or even skin (like scales or feathers), which contain detailed information on how dinosaurs lived and what they looked like.

Another interesting soft tissue that can be found in bones are blood vessels. My research team and I discovered blood vessels preserved in a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil, and our findings were recently published in Scientific Reports.

As an undergraduate physics student at the University of Regina, I joined a research team using particle accelerators to study fossils. There, I first discovered blood vessels in a bone from a T. rex using advanced 3D models. It’s been nearly six years since that moment; I am now working on my PhD where I use my background in physics to advance analysis techniques in fossil research.

An extraordinary specimen

The vessels were found in a remarkable T. rex specimen nicknamed Scotty. Held in the Royal Saskatchewan Museum’s collection in Canada, Scotty is the largest T. rex ever unearthed. The fossil also remains one of the most complete specimens of T. rex.

Scotty appeared to have had a rough life 66 million years ago; many of the recovered bones appeared to have injuries, possibly due to a fight with another dinosaur, or disease. One bone in particular, a section of rib, features a large partially healed fracture.

In general, after bones experience a traumatic event like a fracture, there is a huge increase in the activity of blood vessels in the affected area as part of the healing process. We believe this is what was found in Scotty’s rib: an extensive network of mineralized vessels that we were able to examine using reconstructed 3D models.

Revolutionizing paleontology research

When analyzing fossil bones, there are two main challenges. The first is how to examine the interior of the bones without damaging the fossil. And second, the bones are very large and can be quite dense due to the fossilization process, where minerals replace and fill in original organic materials.

At first, we thought we could perform an computed topography (CT) scan of the bone, similar to what is used for medical purposes, which allows imaging of bones without damaging them. While this solves the first problem, the second problem means that a conventional medical CT machine is not nearly powerful enough to penetrate the dense bone.

For our examination, we used synchrotron light, special high-intensity x-rays. These are produced at select particle accelerator labs, and allow us to investigate microstructures such as blood vessels in the bone with ease.

Synchrotron x-rays can also be useful for chemical analysis. We found the vessels were preserved as iron-rich mineralized casts, a common form of fossilization, but in two distinct layers. This layering is due to the complicated environmental history that led to the exceptional preservation seen in Scotty’s rib.

Written in blood vessels

By analyzing blood vessels produced by an incompletely healed fracture, we can hopefully learn how T. rex healed, helping speculation on how Scotty was able to survive after sustaining injuries. This could lead to evolutionary information comparing the vessel structures seen in Scotty to other dinosaur species, as well as modern relatives to dinosaurs like birds.

The results may also help future fossil exploration by guiding scientists to target bones that show signs of injury or disease, potentially increasing the chances of discovering more vessels or other types of preserved soft tissues.

With cross-disciplinary research and novel applications of advanced technologies, there is so much potential to recreate the past lives of dinosaurs like never before.

Jerit Leo Mitchell receives funding from Mitacs Accelerate and the Sylvia Fedoruk Centre for Nuclear Innovation.

– ref. I’m a physicist who studies fossils, and I recently discovered preserved blood vessels in the world’s largest T. rex – https://theconversation.com/im-a-physicist-who-studies-fossils-and-i-recently-discovered-preserved-blood-vessels-in-the-worlds-largest-t-rex-261786

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Scott Mills, PhD Candidate, Kinesiology and Health Studies, University of Regina

Creatine supplementation is booming among those seeking greater muscle size and performance.

Although creatine is certainly not a new discovery, with research dating back to the 1830s, its popularity and sales have continued to grow, and have expanded beyond bodybuilders and athletes to clinical applications and benefits beyond muscle performance.

Today, creatine stands as one of the most researched supplements, and new findings continue to support its use for consistent and measurable results in bodybuilding, fitness and overall health.

While creatine is naturally found in foods like red meat and seafood, and also produced naturally in the body, supplementation has surged in popularity, especially among young men.

This growth in popularity is largely due to young men’s desire to increase muscle size and muscle strength. Several meta-analyses have looked at the effects of creatine supplementation during resistance training on properties of muscle, and support its use and effectiveness when combined with resistance training.

Simply put, creatine can help maintain energy levels, especially during short-duration, high-intensity exercise like weight training.

Creatine’s role in the body

From a physiological perspective, once in the body, the majority of creatine is stored in the muscle as phosphocreatine (PCr). In this form, it can help maintain energy levels through the maintenance of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which is the body’s primary energy currency.

Because creatine supplementation increases intramuscular levels of creatine, it may enable resistance training at a higher intensity and for longer durations, leading to greater gains in the gym.

Although creatine’s impact on muscle performance may be more well known, it does not paint the whole picture. Research is revealing creatine’s positive impact outside the muscular system, showing positive effects on the storage and metabolism of glucose, blood-flow dynamics, anti-inflammatory effects and positive benefits for cognition and brain function, to name a few.

Dosage and safety

From a research perspective, dosage recommendations for men can vary, but typically either five grams of creatine daily, or a customized dosage based on bodyweight of (0.1 grams per kilogram per day) have been shown to be well-tolerated and effective for increasing muscle performance.

From a food intake perspective, to consume about five grams of creatine in the diet, an individual would have to consume about 1.15 kilograms of beef, or about a kilogram of pork, for example. This means even a diet that is high in creatine-containing foods may not be enough to maximize its benefits.

The high calorie content of eating enough of these foods to reach the target creatine intake makes supplementation a practical and appealing option, both for ease of consumption and calorie considerations.

Also, from a cost perspective, at about $0.50 per serving, it’s an easy and cost-effective strategy to reach creatine intake goals. With new forms of creatine seemingly being released all the time (capsules, gummies and flavoured powders), it makes it easy to maintain intake.

Regarding the safety of creatine supplementation, a position stand paper by the International Society of Sports Nutrition concluded that creatine supplementation poses no greater adverse effects in healthy individuals compared to placebo, even with higher dosages.

With that being said, creatine hasn’t been immune to its share of negative claims. Anecdotally, creatine may have some whispers of undesirable side-effects; however, research looking at common myths and misconceptions of creatine (including concerns about water retention, hair loss and dehydration) have largely removed many of the fears.

Resistance training is key

It’s important to note that while creatine consumption on its own may still show some positive effects, it is largely creatine consumption in combination with resistance training that leads to benefits.

Resistance training can increase measures of muscle growth and performance (muscle power, muscle strength and muscle endurance) and it’s the combination of creatine with resistance training that will maximize its effects. So resistance training is a paramount component to the positive effects of creatine.

Of course, creatine is not an essential nutrient. Individuals can see improvements in muscle growth and muscle performance while focusing on the intake of high-quality and nutrient-rich foods, a well-designed individualized resistance training program, combined with adequate high-quality sleep and proper stress management without the need to supplement creatine.

A healthy lifestyle is the foundation of well-being, including the groundwork for effectively building muscle.

Creatine supplementation has made its way into the hands of those seeking the secret to greater muscle size and performance. It is well researched and widely accepted, and it continues to increase in popularity due to the positive effects when paired with a solid resistance training program, its safe risk profile when consumed at evidence-based dosages and its low-cost.

While creatine supplementation is not essential, it may be a practical, affordable and effective choice for those seeking muscle growth benefits and beyond.

Scott Mills does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The creatine boom: Trends and facts about supplements and use – https://theconversation.com/the-creatine-boom-trends-and-facts-about-supplements-and-use-261817

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Billie Anderson, Ph.D. Candidate, Media Studies, Western University

This story contains spoilers about ‘Eddington,’ ‘Midsommar’ and ‘Hereditary.’

Ari Aster’s new film Eddington is a political satire set in a small American town, where a feud between Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) begins with disagreement over pandemic policy, but quickly escalates into a chaotic, paranoid power struggle. What starts as a clash of ego spirals into increasingly violent and absurd confrontations.

In the film’s closing minutes, Joe is abruptly stabbed in the head by someone described as “anti-fascist terrorist” after an extended shootout. He survives, and the next time we see him he’s a quadriplegic wheelchair user and non-verbal.

By the end, Joe has been appointed mayor, either by default or out of public pity. The last shot leaves him as the town’s figurehead alongside a giant AI data centre in the desert: a monument to the forces that now shape human life, governance and identity.

It’s brutal, cynical, mean-spirited and a tad esoteric. But Aster seems to be offering a scathing portrait of American politics and the men like Joe who populate it: stubborn, self-righteous, vaguely libertarian; men clinging to authority, even as the world moves on without them.

There’s irony in the film’s portrayal of anarchic protesters, live-streamers and the failed machismo of Joe’s character arc. But when the laughter of the climax fades, what remains is something all too familiar: disability as the poetic consequence of bad behaviour. Not as an ongoing human experience, but as karmic spectacle.

Disability as consequence, not condition

Joe’s fate follows a centuries-old narrative pattern in which disability is framed as punishment, poetic justice or moral revelation. From medieval Christian theology to contemporary satire, bodily difference has long been used to symbolize inner failing. Impairment stands in for sin, ego, corruption or spiritual deficiency.

Enlightenment rationalism and eugenics-era pseudoscience cemented this association, casting disabled bodies as physically manifest proof of social and moral inferiority.

Cinema inherited these tropes, and still leans on them. As disability studies scholars David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder argue, disability is often introduced not to explore a character’s complexity, but to serve as a metaphorical crutch or shortcut to meaning.

The disabled body often appears when something needs to be revealed, resolved or punished. In Eddington, Joe’s fate is exactly that.

Disability arrives not as an opening to new experience but as closure: a visual and symbolic transformation from dangerous man to inner object. Joe is no longer speaking, acting or choosing.

The film seems to punish him, not for a single action, but for what he represents: a particular kind of white male authority figure that is combative, self-righteous and increasingly out of touch.

While Joe does oppose the mayor’s early pandemic policies, including mask mandates, his real “crime” in the film is his stubbornness and inflated self-control. He doubles down on personal power, even as systems collapse around him. His disability, then, functions as justice: a final, ironic version of the control he fought so hard to maintain.

He has become a site for meaning-making — a silent figure whose stillness now says everything about the futility of power, the absurdity of authority, the fall of the American sheriff, the political centrist.

Familiar patterns in Aster’s work

Ari Aster’s earlier films follow similar patterns. In Hereditary (2018) Charlie’s facial difference and neurodivergence signal otherness and fragility; her death becomes the hinge on which the horror turns.

In Midsommar (2019), Ruben, a disabled oracle, is portrayed as both holy and someone without personal agency: a vessel for prophecy rather than a fully developed character.

Across Aster’s filmography, disability tends to show up not as life, but as a symbol; as curse, as mysticism, as moral sign. Eddington takes that formula and strips it down even further: Joe becomes disabled at the moment the movie decides he’s no longer needed. It’s efficient, final and familiar.

Disability as visual rhetoric

As disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes, disabled bodies are often positioned as visual rhetoric. They are something to be interpreted, not inhabited.

Joe’s silence and stillness as a result of him becoming disabled don’t invite audiences to understand his experience; they invite us to read him, as if his body were a sentence the director had written.

We do see a glimpse of care: Joe appears to be tended to by a man who is now also his mother-in-law’s partner. But even this is played for laughs.

There’s no reckoning with long-term adaptation, no real engagement with the material realities of disability. The body remains an object, not a subject, and once it serves a rhetorical function, the camera moves on.

The real pandemic disabled millions

The symbolic use of disability hits differently given the film’s setting. Eddington is a pandemic movie — a chaotic satire of COVID-era paranoia, misinformation and isolation.

But COVID-19 hasn’t just destabilized governments, upended social norms and exacerbated online political turmoil — it has disabled people.

Millions globally now live with long COVID, facing chronic pain, fatigue, cognitive impairment and dramatic changes to their work, social lives and health-care access.

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People with long COVID continue to experience medical gaslighting more than 3 years into the pandemic

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The pandemic is a mass disabling event, not a metaphor. And yet, Eddington engages with disability only as a punchline. It becomes an ironic punishment for a man too arrogant to admit his limits. The joke lands harder when it treats disability as poetic justice instead of ongoing reality.

Toward fuller representation

Disability studies invites us to consider disability not as a narrative end point, but as a relational and continuous experience shaped by care networks, access barriers, evolving identities and collective adaptation.

What if Eddington had stayed with Joe after his injury? What if it explored his new position not through silence or shame, but through the messy human realities of interdependence?

What if the satire had gone further, asking not just what happens to a sheriff when he’s taken down, but what happens to power when it must rely on care? What if Joe had died and his mother-in-law had become mayor as a serious disruption of legacy politics?

Absurdism and dark comedy about the body aren’t the problem. But the symbolic shorthand of disability as justice carries weight, especially when disabled people continue to be marginalized, disbelieved and erased in the very real world that Eddington pretends to parody.

A sharper satire would engage with disability as part of the social fabric that challenges the audience to reckon with embodiment, dependence and mutual obligation. It could surprise audiences by refusing the easy exit of moral symbolism. It could be more rewarding, radical — and frankly, more intellectual — than another joke equating impairment with comeuppance.

The portrayal of disability in Eddington is not malicious, but it is predictable. It continues a long tradition of using disability to signal judgement, irony or narrative finality.

But real life doesn’t offer such clean punctuation. Disability is not the end of a story, but the start of a more complex, embodied and political one. Until cinema catches up, satires like Eddington will continue to undermine what they claim to critique.

Billie Anderson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Eddington ends with a dark joke about disability – but its punchline is centuries old – https://theconversation.com/eddington-ends-with-a-dark-joke-about-disability-but-its-punchline-is-centuries-old-262780

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Tamara de Szegheo Lang, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Film and Media, Queen’s University, Ontario

“If coming out of the closet was really as much fun as it is for the sexually adventurous youths in Better Than Chocolate, then everybody would be doing it, even straight people.”

So wrote film critic Bruce Kirkland in his 1999 review of the lesbian romantic comedy by Canadian filmmaker Anne Wheeler.

Kirkland pointed out that real life for queer and trans community members was “tougher, harsher and nastier” than portrayed in the 90-minute romp, but also wrote: “To hell with reality, at least for an hour-and-a-half. This movie is a little treasure and offers a lot of pleasure.”

The endearing rom-com won audience choice awards at a number of gay and lesbian film festivals, including in its hometown of Vancouver.

Today, more than a quarter century later, with hate crimes against queer and trans people on the rise and legal protections, especially in the United States, being threatened or ripped away, the film’s lens on romance — and the joy, safety and complications of being in community — may resonate with contemporary viewers and offer a brief reprieve from the heaviness of the political fight.

Like many Canadian lesbian-driven films from the 1990s, it also serves as an example of filmmakers working in queer communities to highlight once-censored voices, and reflects the sheer ingenuity and creative force of community collaboration in this moment — something that has been underrepresented in broader histories of queer and Canadian national cinema.

Whirlwind romance

In Better Than Chocolate, bookstore employee Maggie (Karyn Dwyer) and nomadic artist Kim (Christina Cox) start a whirlwind romance, moving in together within a matter of hours (echoing the classic U-Haul lesbian stereotype).

Their love story is complicated by the arrival of Maggie’s mother Lila (Wendy Crewson), a judgmental woman fresh off a divorce who doesn’t know her daughter is a lesbian. Comedic chaos ensues as the two young lovebirds navigate romantic, familial and community conflicts, all of which are neatly wrapped up by the end.

Though Better Than Chocolate may ultimately be a feel-good comedy, the film captures a community under attack from outside and within.

Skinheads harass Maggie and Kim, culminating in violence. Judy (Peter Outerbridge) is accosted for being transgender and is consistently misgendered by other lesbians.

The Canadian Border Services Agency purposefully targets neurotic bookstore owner, Frances (played by actor, author, playwright and Canadian lesbian icon Ann-Marie Macdonald), for selling queer literature.

Lesbian-centred 90s film

Better Than Chocolate is only one in a wave of lesbian-centred 90s films made in Canada. In this decade, creatives produced at least 12 narrative feature-length lesbian-centred films, several documentaries and over 400 short films.

Some echo Better Than Chocolate’s romantic tone, but the wave includes a diversity of genres – including erotic thrillers, family dramas and experimental dreamscapes.

Some of these films are well-recognized in the Canadian film canon, including Deepa Mehta’s Fire (1996) and Patricia Rozema’s When Night is Falling (1995), while others have been largely forgotten and prove hard to access today, like Patricia Rivera Spencer’s Dreamers of the Day (1990) and Jeanne Crépeau’s Revoir Julie (1998).

Ecosystem behind lesbian Canadian film

Canadian economic, social and artistic contexts offered a vital creative ecosystem that facilitated such a vibrant era of lesbian-driven cinema.

Feminist filmmaking collectives in the 1970s — like Women in Focus (Vancouver), intervisions/ARC (Toronto) and Reel Life (Halifax) — alongside the launch of Studio D at the National Film Board of Canada in 1974 — provided dedicated space for training talent and for producing films about women’s issues.

Wheeler came up through Studio D, co-directing the studio’s first film in 1975.

Canadian artists also had access to several funding sources, including federal, provincial and local arts councils. Beginning in the late 80s, such funding sources were soliciting more diverse content, a result of community activism driven by marginalized artists.

Importantly, a growing network of queer film festivals aided the development of an invested audience willing to pay to watch queer stories.

From 1985 to 2000, at least 11 annual queer festivals were founded in Canada, including Reel Pride (Winnipeg, 1985); Out on Screen (Vancouver, 1988); image+nation (Montréal, 1989); London Lesbian Film Festival (London, 1991); and Inside Out (Toronto, 1991).

With increasing venues to screen queer work and growing audiences came the demand for more films.

A Vancouver lesbian story

Alongside the broader Canadian context, local contexts also encouraged more filmmakers to tell lesbian stories.

Wheeler had long been committed to making films about lesser-represented Western Canada. While most of her films were set in Alberta, Better Than Chocolate moved her focus to Vancouver and its local queer politics.

The dramatic subplot between bookstore owner Frances and the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) is a clear reference to the then-ongoing Supreme Court of Canada case involving Little Sister’s Book and Art Emporium in Vancouver.

Little Sister’s, a queer bookstore, had been targeted for years by the CBSA, which would delay shipments while confiscating and sometimes damaging materials that it considered obscene.

The film publicized the homophobia of the CBSA, with Frances comedically demanding to know why books such as Little Red Riding Hood had been confiscated.

As we discovered in our archival research, Janine Fuller, the manager of Little Sister’s, provided feedback on an early draft of the screenplay. A flyer from the film’s production company was also used to raise the visibility of the court case.

Local community ties

The film’s community ties extended further. As noted in archival documents and the film’s press package, Canadian trans activist and performance artist Star Maris inspired the filmmakers when crafting the character of Judy. Her song, “I’m Not a Fucking Drag Queen,” was solicited for use within the film.

Vancouver’s lesbian community was invited to participate as extras in a bar scene, with an advertisement stating, “This is an excellent opportunity to meet new friends, party with old ones, have much fun being in a movie.”

Finally, as Anne Wheeler told Eye Weekly in 1999: “Right from the development phase on, we had a group of 12 young lesbian women whom we consulted with and they told us very specifically what they did and didn’t want to see. … So we set out very intentionally to break the mould and dispose of the old perceptions about gay women.”

In returning to Better Than Chocolate and other films, queer audiences may find entertaining gems, but may also be reminded of the power of survival of queer communities.

Better Than Chocolate is now available on CTV. Don’t stop there! In addition to films named above, check out these other Canadian lesbian-centred 90s feature films.

Tokyo Cowboy (1994)

Skin Deep (1994)

Devotion (1995)

Cat Swallows Parakeet and Speaks (1996)

High Art (1998)

2 Seconds (1998)

Emporte-Moi (1999)

Tamara de Szegheo Lang receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)
for the project “Bodies on Fire: Rekindling Canada’s Decade of Lesbian-Driven Filmmaking.”

Dan Vena receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for the project “Bodies on Fire: Rekindling Canada’s Decade of Lesbian-Driven Filmmaking.”

– ref. ‘Better Than Chocolate’ highlights lost 90s decade of lesbian Canadian cinema – https://theconversation.com/better-than-chocolate-highlights-lost-90s-decade-of-lesbian-canadian-cinema-259494

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Hamza Tariq, PhD Student, Cognitive Psychology, University of Waterloo

New inventions — like the printing press, magnetic compasses, steam engines, calculators and the internet — can create radical shifts in our everyday lives. Many of these new technologies were met with some degree of skepticism by those who lived through the transition.

Over the past 30 years alone, we’ve seen our relationship with the internet transform dramatically — it’s fundamentally changed how we search for, remember and learn information; how we evaluate and trust information; and, more recently, how we encounter and interact with artificial intelligence.

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AI can be responsibly integrated into classrooms by answering the ‘why’ and ‘when’

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As new technologies and ways of doing things emerge, we fixate on their flaws and errors, and judge them more harshly than what we’re already familiar with. These apprehensions are not unwarranted. Today, important debates continue around accountability, ethics, transparency and fairness in the use of AI.

But how much of our aversion is really about the technology itself, and how much is driven by the discomfort of moving away from the status quo?

Algorithm aversion

As a PhD student in cognitive psychology, I study human judgment and decision-making, with a focus on how we evaluate mistakes, and how context, like the status quo, can shape our biases.

In my research with cognitive psychologists Jonathan A. Fugelsang and Derek J. Koehler, we tested how people evaluate errors made by humans versus algorithms depending on what they saw as the norm.

Despite algorithms’ track record of consistently outperforming humans in several prediction and judgment tasks, people have been hesitant to use algorithms. This mistrust goes back as far as the 1950s, when psychologist Paul Meehl argued that simple statistical models could make more accurate predictions than trained clinicians. Yet the response from experts at the time was far from welcoming. As psychologist Daniel Kahneman would later put it, the reaction was marked by “hostility and disbelief.”

That early resistance continues to echo in more recent research, which shows that when an algorithm makes a mistake, people tend to judge and punish it more harshly than when a human makes the same error. This phenomenon is now called algorithm aversion.

Defining convention

We examined this bias by asking participants to evaluate mistakes made by either a human or by an algorithm. Before seeing the error, we told them which option was considered the conventional one — described as being historically dominant, widely used and typically relied upon in that scenario.

In half the trials, the task was said to be traditionally done by humans. In the other half, we reversed the roles, indicating that the role had traditionally been done by an algorithmic agent.

When humans were framed as the norm, people judged algorithmic errors more harshly. But when algorithms were framed as the norm, people’s evaluations shifted. They were now more forgiving of algorithmic mistakes, and harsher on humans making the same mistakes.

This suggests that people’s reactions may have less to do with algorithms versus humans, and more to do with whether something fits their mental picture of how things are supposed to be done. In other words, we’re more tolerant when the culprit is also the status quo. And we’re tougher on mistakes that come from what feels new or unfamiliar.

Intuition, nuance and skepticism

Yet, explanations for algorithm aversion continue to make intuitive sense. A human decision-maker, for instance, might be able to consider the nuances of real life like an algorithmic system never could.

But is this aversion really just about the non-human limitations of algorithmic technologies? Or is part of the resistance rooted in something broader — something about shifting from one status quo to another?

These questions, viewed through the historic lens of human relationships with past technologies, led us to revisit common assumptions about why people are often skeptical and less forgiving of algorithms.

Signs of that transition are all around us. After all, debates around AI haven’t slowed its adoption. And for a few decades now, algorithmic tech has already been helping us navigate traffic, find dates, detect fraud, recommend music and movies, and even help diagnose illnesses.

And while many studies document algorithm aversion, recent ones also show algorithm appreciation — where people actually prefer or defer to algorithmic advice in a variety of different situations.

We’re increasingly leaning on algorithms, especially when they’re faster, easier and appear just as (or more) reliable. As that reliance grows, a shift in how we view technologies like AI — and their errors — seems inevitable.

This shift from outright aversion to increasing tolerance suggests that how we judge mistakes may have less to do with who makes them and more to do with what we’re accustomed to.

Hamza Tariq has received funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council (NSERC) of Canada.

– ref. As the status quo shifts, we’re becoming more forgiving when algorithms mess up – https://theconversation.com/as-the-status-quo-shifts-were-becoming-more-forgiving-when-algorithms-mess-up-261166

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Melanie Prentice, Research Associate, University of British Columbia

In 2013, a mysterious epidemic swept across the Pacific Coast of North America, rapidly turning billions of sea stars from Mexico to Alaska into goo.

Its name, sea star wasting disease (SSWD), describes what you might have seen if you wandered the shores of the Pacific Northwest at that time: contorted sea star bodies and fragmented arms littered the sea floor, as the tissues of sea stars melted away within a matter of days.

In the more than 10 years that has followed, SSWD has been described as the largest epidemic ever recorded in a wild marine species, and one of the 10 greatest unsolved ocean mysteries. Attempts to identify the pathogen responsible have turned up more questions than answers, until now.

We have recently published the findings of our five-year research project into the cause of SSWD.

Our team included multi-national and multi-disciplinary researchers from academic, government and non-profit institutions, a collaboration that was critical for the success of this work.

Together, we conducted laboratory experiments and analyzed data from wild outbreaks of SSWD to identify the pathogen responsible: a novel strain of the bacterium Vibrio pectenicida.

The significance of sea stars

Aside from the devastating loss of these charismatic rocky-shore inhabitants, the implications of this epidemic reverberate throughout the ecosystems sea stars inhabit.

More than two dozen species appear to be afflicted by SSWD, which vary in their susceptibility to the disease. Most susceptible is the sunflower sea star, a voracious marine predator and the largest species of sea star. They can grow to the size of a bicycle tire and have as many as 24 arms.

Almost six billion sunflower sea stars have been lost to SSWD, placing them on the critically endangered species list. With them, the kelp forest ecosystems they help to regulate have disappeared.

Sunflower sea stars keep kelp forests thriving by preying on sea urchins. With the rapid disappearance of these predators, unchecked urchin populations increased rapidly, mowing down kelp forests and replacing these lush, biodiverse ecosystems with urchin barrens.

The loss of kelp has had knock-on effects for the numerous species that rely on it for food and habitat. Alongside this staggering loss of biodiversity, millions of dollars from fishing and tourism are lost to impacted communities.

Although harder to quantify, the ecosystem services of kelp forests are also impacted, including water filtration which improves water quality, sediment stabilization that protects coastlines from erosion and storms, and carbon capture that helps mitigate the effects of climate change.

Recovery of kelp forests, and the species reliant upon them, requires a deeper understanding of SSWD and the sea stars devastated by it. The first step in our research was to identify the culprit responsible, however, the task proved more difficult than we initially anticipated.

A pathogen is revealed

Among the many possible pathogens suspected of causing the SSWD epidemic, it is unsurprising that the culprit turned out to be in the Vibrio species group.

From multiple diseases in corals to cholera in humans, the abundance of harmful Vibrio species in our oceans is on the rise with climate change as these bacteria favour warmer waters.

However, narrowing in on the specific culprit was not an easy undertaking. Vibrio pectenicida has some unusual characteristics not observed in other Vibrio species, allowing it to evade detection for more than a decade.

This was originally considered a risky and potentially unanswerable question. However, years of laboratory experiments and field sampling recently culminated in successful mortality-inducing experiments using a pure culture isolated by Amy Chan, a research scientist at the University of British Columbia, of the novel Vibrio pectenicida strain.

Named FHCF-3, it stands apart from previously identified strains (different genetic variants) by less than three per cent of its genome. Such strains have been isolated from diseased scallop larvae in France, crabs in the United Kingdom and, most recently, geoduck larvae from the Pacific Northwest.

Whether or not these strains can cause SSWD remains to be answered, but the potential implications are clear; with a large host range, broad geographic distribution, and propensity for warm seawater temperatures anticipated with advancing climate change, this pathogen is one to watch.

No time to waste

Like removing a blindfold, the identification of the pathogen causing SSWD unveils new opportunities for research and management of the species and ecosystems affected.

First on the list is developing a diagnostic test that can detect the genetic sequence of the pathogen. This would allow researchers to test sea star or seawater samples for its presence.

Much like the COVID-19 test eased humanity out of lockdowns, this test will help inform marine management by helping diagnose healthy versus sick sea stars, and identifying locations best suited for reintroduction efforts.

Another target of future research is to identify resilient sea stars (those that can either prevent infection entirely or fight it off once it takes hold) for conservation breeding.

Resilient individuals, particularly of highly vulnerable species like sunflower sea stars, will be vital for recovery efforts in a warming ocean where Vibrio pectenicida is already widespread.

Despite the odds, the identification of the SSWD pathogen provides a new hopeful vision for our oceans and their inhabitants; one where disease-resilient sunflower sea stars once again roam the sea floor among thriving kelp forests replete with vibrant marine life.

Melanie Prentice receives funding from The Tula Foundation and The Nature Conservancy of California.

Alyssa-Lois Gehman receives funding from the Tula Foundation and The Nature Conservancy. She is affiliated with the Hakai Institute

Drew Harvell receives funding from The Nature Conservancy.

Grace Crandall receives funding from The Nature Conservancy.

– ref. The bacteria killing sea stars in the Pacific: How our team uncovered a decade-long mystery – https://theconversation.com/the-bacteria-killing-sea-stars-in-the-pacific-how-our-team-uncovered-a-decade-long-mystery-259875

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Kerry Sinanan, Associate Professor of Global pre-1800 Literature, University of Winnipeg

The BBC’s recent docuseries, Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius, the PBS mini-series Miss Austen as well as cultural and tourism festivities are all marking the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth for a global audience.

Scholars have long noted Austen’s significant innovations with the novel form and enduring popularity.

Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius follows the 2023 BBC series Shakespeare: Rise of a Genius. Through the show’s titling and packaging, and by combining scholarly with popular commentary, the series promotes Austen as an authorial standard of modern literature.

It also sometimes presents her as socially subversive and a breaker of barriers, amplifying arguments that she was a “radical.”

The meaning of the word radical is to uproot and dismantle fundamental structures. Austen’s novels, skilful and absorbing as they are, offer no social or political revolutions: rather, they reform and realign Regency Britain, using the romance plot and its Cinderella template.

From my perspective as a professor of global pre-1800 literature who has studied narratives around the Black Atlantic, Caribbean slavery and race, what the series perhaps overlooks is that, in today’s context of Brexit, the politics of canon and tradition affirm a nationalist and neoimperial culture.

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This article is part of a series commemorating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. Despite having published only six books, she is one of the best-known authors in history. These articles explore the legacy and life of this incredible writer.

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Framing of slavery and empire

The series presents the 18th century as “booming” from the wealth of trade. While slavery and empire are mentioned in the first episode, the narration states slavery was being challenged by “progress and equality.”

Characterizing the Regency as a time for emerging progressive politics repeats colonial discourse and racial hierarchies, ignoring the fact that the high point of racism and British global empire in the Victorian era followed its slave-trading years. Enlightenment “progress” and abolitionism led to imperial domination.

As literary and cultural critic Edward Said explained, we should read the formation of the European “canon as a polyphonic accompaniment to the expansion of Europe.”

Said argues “imperialist discourse” in works by Austen and other canonical writers goes hand in hand with colonialism on the ground. Caribbean slavery is the backdrop for Mansfield Park, which sees Sir Thomas Bertram visit his plantations in Antigua to boost his profits.

As the BBC series acknowledges, Austen’s family benefited from slavery, as did many of her contemporaries, in an age when Britain dominated the slave trade.

The 250th birthday celebrations of Austen’s birth need to be read in the context of recreating a white, nationalist culture for a reactionary Brexit Britain, proud of its military Redcoats and imperial past — reflected in celebratory romance, afternoon tea, naval officers, muslin-gown esthetics and cosplay.

Characterization of the British Navy

One contributor to the BBC series is retired Royal Navy admiral Lord Alan William John West, a Labour Peer. He describes the British Navy of the time as “charting the world” and “leading scientific discovery,” uncritically deploying the language of colonial “discovery” and Enlightenment values.

This erases the Asian, African and Indigenous cultures that Britain colonized via trade monopolies, slavery, the East India Company and settler colonialism.

These histories have lasting legacies: West caused a furor in 2020 when he stated that asylum seekers crossing the English Channel in small boats should be put in “a concentrated place, whether it’s a camp or whatever.”

How the British government deploys its navy in the 21st century cannot be separated from ongoing colonial and nationalist actions.

‘Genius’ discourse

Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius touches upon Austen’s narrative innovation and importance (something intimated by literature scholar Paddy Bullard, who states there was writing before Austen and after Austen). Through the “genius” title and some “genius” commentary, the series appears to twin this analysis with the suggestion that Austen was counter-cultural.

Well-known author Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones’s Diary) describes Austen as a “genius” and the term is used by other writers, too.

The label “genius” perpetuates racist 18th-century Chain of Being discourses that placed white people at the top of a racialized hierarchy of being and Black people at the bottom. In 1774’s An History of the Earth and Animated Nature, Oliver Goldsmith concluded “man is naturally white.”

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Read more:
How whiteness was invented and fashioned in Britain’s colonial age of expansion

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“Genius” is an ableist concept based in post-Darwinian eugenics and suggests a connection between supposed intelligence and evolution.

Austen and conservative social roles

One of the most prominent literary critics of Austen, British scholar Marilyn Butler, argued in Jane Austen and the War of Ideas that Austen’s novels confirm conservative roles for women in society, emphasizing “self-abnegation” and duty, and that she refused radical, Jacobin ideas of equality and political revolution.

Indeed, while a multiplicity of perspectives can be read in Austen, the structures of Austen’s plots ultimately affirm a conservative social and political order.

Far from being subversive, Austen, via alluring romance plots, massages her class-structured society into accepting the lower gentry and trading class, such as the Bennets and Gardiners in Pride and Prejudice.

Reading Austen and slavery

As I have argued, Darcy is not only an ideal romantic hero, but an ideal Briton at the heart of empire, ready to anchor the landed ancien régime of England as it moved into the burgeoning era of global domination, with a morality rooted in Protestant supremacy.

In the series, Bullard describes Austen as a “fan” of abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, and Austen biographer Paula Byrne reads Mansfield Park as a “serious” engagement with the “shadows” of slavery and “women’s suppression.”

Yet, while slavery is alluded to, the novel is not clearly anti-slavery. In Mansfield Park Austen offers a careful satire of an enslaving family, but one that positively secures the Bertrams’ place in society, merely amending their values.

Recent scholarship that uncovered how Austen’s brothers participated in the abolition movement after her death suggests Austen may have been on her way to becoming a public abolitionist.

However, this is speculative: while many women writers such as Hannah More and Anne Yearsley wrote explicitly anti-slavery pieces, Austen was not a public abolitionist.

Slavery suffused Romantic literature. At a time abounding with radical writers and anti-slavery pamphlets, poems and tracts, including those written by formerly enslaved people such as Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano, the fact that Austen — like her contemporaries — became increasingly aware of the inhumanity of the Middle Passage is not saying much.

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Read more:
My new history of romanticism shows how enslavement shaped European culture

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Perpetuating myth

Suggesting Mansfield Park deeply treats aspects of slavery or women’s suppression glosses over the legal realities of chattel slavery. Under English colonial law, enslaved women’s children were transformed into legal property.

Women in 18th-century Britain had limited rights, but as Austen’s novels illustrate, they were not legal property. We follow her heroines taking their desired places, including Fanny Price, in securing a culture of white, male inheritance.

Austen was a compelling innovator of the novel form. Presenting her as radical and a genius misunderstands her art and misrepresents the imperial culture that she was part of, instead perpetuating new myths of a British literary canon.

Kerry Sinanan has received funding from the AHRC, the Beinecke Library, Yale, Yale Center for British Art, the James Ford Bell Library, and the Corning Museum of Glass.

– ref. Jane Austen at 250: Why we shouldn’t exaggerate her radicalism – https://theconversation.com/jane-austen-at-250-why-we-shouldnt-exaggerate-her-radicalism-259834

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By David Sills, Director, Northern Tornadoes Project, Western University

Our ability to predict extreme weather from thunderstorms, like the recent catastrophic flash floods in Texas, is unsettlingly poor, even in the hours leading up to the event. Improvements in understanding, detecting and predicting extreme thunderstorms — and increasing community resilience to them — are badly needed.

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Read more:
The anatomy of a flash flood: Why the Texas flood was so deadly

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Severe thunderstorms are a regular aspect of summer weather in Canada. A severe storm becomes extreme when the intensity of a thunderstorm hazard (tornado, downburst, damaging hail or flooding rains) escalates to a level rarely observed. Or, when the impacts of a storm are extreme due to enhanced exposure and vulnerability, resulting in significant casualties and economic losses. In some cases, both intensity and impacts are extreme.

At the new Canadian Severe Storms Laboratory at Western University, we’re exploring how to understand and reduce risks produced by extreme weather. Research projects include the Northern Tornadoes Project, the Northern Hail Project, the Northern Mesonet Project and an upcoming project focusing on thunderstorm flash flooding.

Extreme storms

We compiled a list of the top 10 worst natural disasters in Canada, ranked by insured losses over the last 20 years. While the 2016 fire that devastated Fort McMurray, Alta., tops the list, half of the events are associated with extreme thunderstorms.

This includes two Calgary-area hailstorms in 2020 and 2024, the Ontario-Québec derecho of 2022 and two Toronto-area flash floods (2024 and 2013). Each of these disasters cost close to $1 billion or more in insured losses.

One commonality among these events is that on the morning of the extreme event, there was little to no indication that an extreme thunderstorm would occur. In fact, in each case, it was not clear even during the storm that an extreme event was underway. Clearly, this affects the accuracy, timeliness and urgency of weather alerts meant to keep people safe.

Another commonality is that extreme thunderstorms can have a very short “fuse.” Unlike heat waves, droughts and other larger-scale phenomena, the threat due to thunderstorm-related extreme weather can increase suddenly.

Risk assessment and unreasonable data

A simple model of risk is “hazard” x “vulnerability”, which means that the risk to people and property can be determined based on both the type, intensity and coverage of a dangerous weather phenomenon and the ability of households and infrastructure to cope with and recover from the hazard’s harmful impacts.

Weather forecasters are trained to analyze and synthesize all available meteorological data to identify the most likely future state of the atmosphere and any related risks.

This often involves dismissing extreme outliers — if the numerical weather prediction (NWP) models are even able to predict them — and focusing on more plausible forecasts. Weather observation networks are also not optimized for extreme weather; sometimes, critical data are lost in power outages or are suppressed because they go beyond what is deemed reasonable.

With the 2013 Toronto flood, for example, even cutting-edge NWP models using a variety of different approaches were unable to reproduce the focused rainfall that resulted in the flash flooding. Future NWP models need to be optimized for handling such extreme events.

Extreme impacts

On the vulnerability side of the equation, it is rarely clear where exactly a storm — be it severe or extreme — will hit, even just hours before. If it affects a vulnerable area, like a tornado hitting tightly packed homes in a subdivision or heavy rain affecting a campground surrounded by steep terrain, then impacts are likely to be extreme.

So what actions are required to optimize detecting, forecasting and alerting for extreme thunderstorms? First, a more sophisticated model of risk might be:

risk = (hazard x vulnerability x exposure) / resilience

This helps to further refine the risk.

To enhance our ability to detect, predict and alert for extreme thunderstorm hazards, we need to develop techniques and tools to better identify situations where the outlier solution may be plausible or even realistic, given the conditions.

This is required both for NWP models that are increasingly used for forecasting, and for observation networks such as weather stations and radars that can indicate to a forecaster that a warning is needed immediately.

To know where hazards occur most frequently, we need to know the hazard’s climatology — the locations where it is strongest or occurs most frequently. This requires collecting vast quantities of data, assessing the intensity of hazards and ensuring the quality of the data. Improved data will allow decision-makers to minimize costs, ensuring that the benefits of the measures outstrip the costs.

Improved knowledge about community vulnerability is also important. Up-to-date flood maps are critical for understanding how heavy rain may turn into disastrous flash flooding, for example. However, preparing a community for an event having an intensity it has never experienced before is an additional challenge.

Resilient communities

As urbanization continues and cities grow outward, exposure to hazards is increased. What were once fields or flatlands become vulnerable residential or industrial developments.

Communities can improve their resilience to extreme thunderstorms through short-term coping tactics and longer-term adaptive strategies — particuarly as weather extremes in general increase due to climate change.

Overall, improving our ability to detect, predict and alert for extreme thunderstorms — and increase community resilience to them — is a massive undertaking. It is essentially a community endeavour that requires the efforts of academia, governments, industry, emergency managers and the public. The ultimate goals are to prevent casualties, and to keep people in their homes and keep schools and businesses open, following extreme thunderstorm events.

David Sills receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and ImpactWX.

Gregory Kopp receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, ImpactWX, the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety and the National Research Council.

– ref. It’s challenging to predict extreme thunderstorms — improving this will help reduce their deadly and costly impacts – https://theconversation.com/its-challenging-to-predict-extreme-thunderstorms-improving-this-will-help-reduce-their-deadly-and-costly-impacts-261071

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Louis-Etienne Dubois, Associate Professor, School of Creative Industries, The Creative School, Toronto Metropolitan University

When French video-game publisher Ubisoft announced it was shutting down servers for The Crew, a popular online racing game released in 2014, it wasn’t just the end of a title. It marked the beginning of a broader reckoning about the nature of digital ownership, led by players angry at the company’s decision to deny them something they had paid for.

The Stop Killing Games (SKG) movement was born from that moment. As of July 2025, it has gathered more than 1.4 million signatures through the European Citizens’ Initiative. The European Commission is now obliged to respond.

At the heart of the issue is a deceptively simple question: when we buy a video game, what are we actually purchasing? For many gamers, the answer used to be obvious. A game was a product, something you owned, kept and could return to at will.

However, live service games have changed that dynamic. These are games usually played online with others and that typically require subscriptions or in-game payments to access features or content. They include popular titles such as Fortnite, League of Legends and World of Warcraft.

With live service games, players are learning that what they’ve really bought is something more tenuous: access.

And, evidently, access is something that can be revoked.

Erasing gaming communities

The issue goes well beyond The Crew. In the last couple of years alone, several games have been shut down, including Anthem, Concord, Knockout City, Overwatch 1, RedFall and Rumbleverse.

There are valid reasons why companies might choose to end support for a title. The game industry is saturated and brutally competitive. Margins are tight, player expectations are high and teams often face impossible deadlines. When an online game underperforms, a publisher will likely be inclined to cut their losses and shut it down.

Games tend to accumulate bugs in their code that are complex to clean and create player dissatisfaction. In our research, we have shown that when a game underperforms or becomes too costly to maintain, shutting it down can be a rational, even reparative, decision on many levels.

Yet, when companies decide to shut down a live service game’s servers, it’s not just content that vanishes. So do the communities built around it, the digital assets (costumes, weapons and so on) players have earned or paid for and the sometimes hundreds of hours invested in mastering it. In the blink of an eye, the game is gone, often without recourse or compensation.

That’s not just a customer service issue; it’s a cultural one.

Games are not just another type of software. They are creative works that can foster shared experiences and vibrant communities.

Players don’t just consume games, they inhabit them. They trade stories, build friendships and express themselves through digital spaces. Turning those spaces off can feel, to many, like erasing a part of their lives.

This profound disconnect between business logic and player experience, which we theorized in the past, is what gave rise to the SKG movement. Video game publishers failed to anticipate the cultural backlash triggered by these shutdowns.

What regulators can do

Players of shut-down games may believe they were misled and should be compensated. Unfortunately, the current system offers little transparency and even less protection for them.

That’s where regulation can help. The European Commission now has a chance to provide much-needed clarity on what consumers in the European Union are actually buying when they purchase live service games.

A good starting point would be requiring companies to disclose whether a purchase grants the buyer ownership or limited access, akin to recent legislation passed in California.

Minimum support periods, clearer content road maps (the projected updates) and making companies create mandatory offline versions for discontinued online games might also help prevent misunderstandings.

There’s room for creativity here, too. Rather than killing a game outright, companies could allow player communities to take over its maintenance and allow for the continued creation of new content, especially for titles with active fan bases.

This is known as “modding,” and in some cases, community-led revivals have even inspired publishers to re-release enhanced editions years later.

Developers need protections too

There’s another part of this story that’s unfortunately overlooked: the people who make these games. Video game developers are regularly subjected to long hours, poor conditions and toxic workplace cultures in order to meet the demands of continuous live service updates.

In our research, we’ve found that this new model of endless content creation and perpetual support is unsustainable, not just financially or technologically, but humanly.

Instead of periodically “crunching,” live service game developers are now constantly “grinding.” Somehow, in an industry notoriously demanding for workers, this model has managed to make things even worse.

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Read more:
The video game industry is booming. Why are there so many layoffs?

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Policymakers need to protect both players and the workers creating games. That means, among other things, rethinking release schedules, enforcing rest periods for development teams and holding companies accountable for the well-being of their staff. The overall health of the industry depends on it.

Whether you support the SKG movement or not, the issues it raises are urgent. While the ownership question is a very legitimate one, video game developers deserve more care and protection.

The European Commission’s response could help define the future of digital ownership, cultural preservation and ethical labour in gaming.

Louis-Etienne Dubois received funding from SSHRC in 2019 to investigate the rise of live service games.

Miikka J. Lehtonen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. ‘Stop Killing Games’: Demands for game ownership must also include workers’ rights – https://theconversation.com/stop-killing-games-demands-for-game-ownership-must-also-include-workers-rights-262774