Category Archives: Digital

Color in Super Smash Bros

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Peachtree City, GA
Performance Date: 4/26/2015
Primary Language: English

My informant is an avid player of the Super Smash Brothers game series. This game has fostered a very unique community due to its wide appeal and unique gameplay mechanics. This community encompass all players who play the game, but in this interview when my informant talks about the “Smash Brothers community” he is referring to the community of thirty or so individuals who meet up weekly (or biweekly) at his local game store to play the game together. When they meet up and compete with each other it is called a “local” which simply is shorthand for local gathering or local tournament.

Transcription:

Me: So knowing that your main character is a large part of your identity in this game, is there any way to decide who is the definitive player of a certain character.

Him: Well yes and no. Because Super Smash Brothers is such a complex series there often isn’t an objective best player of a certain character within a community. If there is however, he would be the definitive player if that makes sense. However, when you pick a character you also pick what color costume you want him to wear. There are between four and 8 alternate costumes for each character I believe, depending on which game in the series you are playing. When you main a character you usually also pick your color. For example, I am our communities gold Captain Falcon and my friend uses pink Captain Falcon. This way people can tell us apart when watching the game even if they cannot see who is playing.

Me: But what if two people use the same color?

Him: Actually that doesn’t really happen. Once you’ve claimed a color it is kind of yours. Sure some else could use that color, after all there are tons of smashers (slang for members of the smash bros community) and only so many color combinations, but if they do it in your local area, or in a big tournament it would be pretty disrespectful.

Me: Why would it be disrespectful?

Him: I’m not actually sure why people make so much of a big deal out of it, but I guess it is because using someone else’s color is kind of like calling them out. If you use their color and lose the match it looks like you were saying they are bad. If you win the match while using their color it looks like you were saying that you are better than them. People actually get really serious about this. Sometimes at tournaments or other large gatherings people of the same main (people who play the same character regularly) who use the same color will challenge each other to a best of 5 match. Whoever wins the match gets to keep the color. Its kind of a big deal.

Me: So if you lose you just have to stop using that color.

Him: That’s right. At least publicly.

Analysis:

It is fascinating how much a color matters to members of this community. At first glance it seems almost unreasonable how much they fight for “their color” when there is no way to determine whose color it was first. However, when you see the sheer size of the smash bros community, you realize that it must be very hard to stand out. Given that, it makes sense that these players fight to cling on to whatever little piece of unique identity they can have.  In this game there are only two ways to change how you look like. You can pick a different character or you can change your color. That means that your color is half of your visual identity. Knowing that, it is understandable how these player would take their color so seriously.

STAR WARS “IMPERIAL MARCH” DJ BATTLE

Nationality: Chinese-American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: USC, From Portland, Oregon
Performance Date: 4/18/15
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

ABOUT THE INFORMANT:

My informant is a senior graduating this semester from USC. He is a biomedical engineer, and is the oldest son of two immigrants from China.

EXAMPLE:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw0v6kkasMk

DESCRIPTION:

“This is this weird video I found a while ago when I was searching through the bowels of the internet. I guess it’s this DJ {DJ Skratch Bastid} like scratching the Star Wars song on turntables. Not the like heroic one, the one that Darth Vader comes out to all the time. But it’s like during this head-to-head DJ battle, and he basically just plays this out of nowhere and shuts it down.

It’s just such a classic song, you know? It’s legendary. To pull that out so spontaneously, to mash it up that way, it’s really unique. Because, like, everyone knows that song and Star Wars and Darth Vader. It’s just a show stopper.”

ANALYSIS:

The setup here is that two DJ’s are battling back and forth, with each DJ allowed a certain amount of time to cut and scratch the records of his choosing. The idea is that from the music and sounds that someone else made, using the turntables, a person can make a new song or beat to it.

This is similar to mashup culture in general; in fact it is most likely the precursor to it, as this whole DJ culture of mixing and mashing records together has been popular for several decades.

The idea of mashups in general already create some grey area as to who the writer, owner, and author of the piece of music is, considering that it someone, the DJ, is using other previously authored, by the artist, pieces of music, which are owned by the record label, to create new music.

This version adds a new wrinkle to it, in that the new music created is in fact a cover of the “Imperial March” written by John Williams from the Star Wars films. This is therefore a mashup of previously recorded material. The folklore here has a few different dimensions to it.

The Star Wars films are unequivocally one of the most iconic film franchises of all time with its music being equally as recognizable. The song in question is the theme to the villain in the film, one of the most famous villains in all of cinema, and therefore carries a sort of clout and power with it. For someone to use the song in a head-to-head battle is almost like asserting your authority over them because of the context behind it.

Here, the song takes on a new power to it than it originally did when it was featured in the films because it contains all of the lore of the Star Wars films behind it.

Hear the original “Imperial March” in the Star Wars films.

THE BUTTON

Nationality: Chinese-American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: USC, from Portland, Oregon
Performance Date: 4/23/15
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

ABOUT THE INFORMANT:

My informant is a senior graduating this semester from USC. He is a biomedical engineer, and is the oldest son of two immigrants from China.

EXAMPLE:

https://www.reddit.com/r/thebutton/

CONTEXT/BACKGROUND:

“I found this thing, well actually, my buddy sent it over to me because he is the one who always spends his time on the internet, Reddit in general, and he showed it to me. It’s basically this button, I guess it’s been up since April 1st. Apparently it was supposed to be like an April’s Fools joke, you know? So that’s how it all begun.

The whole concept is that there is like this timer. And it is counting down from 60 seconds. And every time someone clicks it, then the clock resets back to 60. And so far, I guess like over 800,000 people have clicked it. And you can only click it once. And in order to be eligible to click it you must have a Reddit account from before April 1st, 2015. There is like a whole wiki that the people of Reddit created on it.

But essentially, it’s like never dropped to 00. Like the clock has never run out. Someone has always clicked it before the clock runs out, you know. So, like, some people just watch it. And some sites track it, I guess.

But then like, Reddit started giving you a badge with a specific color for when you pressed it on the timer. So like Anywhere between 60 and 50 you get a purple badge, and then it keeps working its way down the wire until you get Red, which is between 10-00.

But now what’s happened is that like a hierarchy, a class system has like been established. Because the color is shown on your profile. So they will have like the red, green, purple, whatever, and then if you haven’t clicked it, it’s gray. So now like Red is like the best, with Purple seen as the worst. And then gray is like the pacifists or whatever. Like they aren’t taking part. And their are subreddits about the colors.

So now everyone has like their own community. And then there’s been like fan fiction, comics, memes, all about these freakin’ colors and the button.

It’s absurd.

And then since it’s also never run out, everyone is kind of panicking too about what will happen when it does.”

ANALYSIS:

What’s so funny about this is that there is this community that has sprung up from just a button. It is now for some people a form of identity. I do not think I could have ever predicted that if something like this happened people would care about it this much. Of course, this obsession of the button is quite contained, but people take it seriously.

I think it is interesting that people have started creating forms of media all about the button, linking the community together through inside jokes and vernacular that only they know. It has become this cause, to keep the button alive, and then in that it has turned into a system that mirrors our own in terms of society and classism. On one hand, I would like to think that for some people it is pure satire, but I think for others they actually are buying into it. There is like a real pride from being in the red group. And there are inside jokes just based on what color you are. It really is a weird mirror of society in its own way.

SONGIFY THE NEWS

Nationality: Chinese-American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: USC, from Portland, Oregon
Performance Date: 4/18/15
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

ABOUT THE INFORMANT:

My informant is a senior graduating this semester from USC. He is a biomedical engineer, and is the oldest son of two immigrants from China.

EXAMPLE:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMtZfW2z9dw

BACKGROUND:

“Okay so first of all I have to start this one by saying there is obviously nothing funny about rape, sexual harassment, intruders, and whatever else happened here. That all said this is hilarious.

So I guess that this started by a news, like a news report, or cast, like a newscast that went viral. I guess this guy went into this family’s house, and then she like saw him or something and ran away.

But that all doesn’t really matter. The part of the story that is important is that they interviewed the victim’s brother. And right away he comes on screen, he just stands out. It’s just really funny. He just gets into the camera, basically calling out the guy, “You are so dumb. You are really dumb, fo real.”

“Hide yo kids, hide yo wife, and hide yo husband, because they raping everybody out here.” He’s so matter of fact. And animated. It is just perfect.

So I think that the video went viral. And then this group took it, auto tuned him, threw a beat over it and remixed it into a song. Which I actually think is kind of catchy. Like you definitely start bobbing your head to it.

But it also kind of makes it a little bit more emphatic. Like he looks less ridiculous now. It was almost always meant to be a song.

So then that went viral. Fast forward hundreds of millions of views and a few years later, and I’m watching that new show, “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”. It’s on Netflix. Tina Fey made it. And the intro, like she basically, not Tina Fey, this other girl, Erin from “The Office”. She was kidnapped as a girl. That’s the premise. So she got taken by this guy, who is like a cult leader. And so she is thrown into this cult where he brainwashes them to think that the world has ended. So the intro is them being found. Like by the police. So the beginning of the first episode is them being rescued, and then it cuts into this newscast. Where they go to interview the guy who found them, who is like just as animated as the guy from this video.

But then the video starts getting like remixed. Just like this. So then the theme for the show is actually a remixed version of the news coverage from the show. Which of course brought me back to this guy. And so I Youtubed it again. And I found their channel, and I saw that the guys who made this, actually made that video too. So I thought that was kind of cool.”

ANALYSIS:

This is unique because it is an example of how folklore actually infiltrated into the mainstream. After doing some research there was a video of the “interview” of the character from the television show who is remixed.  Meaning that the writers probably wrote the script for the interview, and then really gave it to the makers of the other songifyed videos and let them go to work, which is kind of cool.

The original of course is a mashup in that it is someone on television news being remixed. Who is the owner? Who is the genius? The man, the music, or the producer for choosing to interview him and keep him on air for that long? It really it could be argued any of them are. It is interesting then that the television show, which is on an entirely online streaming platform, Netflix, chose to tap into this internet folklore. It is savvy to attract the younger viewers, it’s catchy, and it is true to how it is that we interact with news stories like this normally.

The Y2K Virus

Nationality: Chinese American
Age: 23
Occupation: Freelance Illustrator/Student
Residence: Glendale, CA
Performance Date: 4/26/2015
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

Y2K stands for Year 2000. In the 90s, computers were still a relatively new addition to the daily lives of Americans, and few understood how they worked. As the new millennium approached, a rumor spread that because computers only handle dates in 2 digits, when the numbers changed to 00 at the turn of the millennium, all computers would shut down due to their inability to compute the date, resulting in an event imagined to be the opposite of what is now imagined to be the Singularity.

GT: one of my neighbors bought enough canned food and water to survive an apocalypse, like he literally blew his life savings on survival supplies to prepare for Y2K virus. He thought it’d be anarchy but the virus never happened.

In reality, the Y2K problem did actually exist, as computers only stored 2 digits for each date and 2000 was indistinguishable from 1900. The rollover from 99 to 00 caused logical problems due to the lack of a 3rd digit. However, this is entirely a programming issue, and most companies were able to upgrade their systems to avert a possible crisis before it occurred. In fact, on January 1, 2000, the main impact of the date glitch caused some malfunctions in data storage only after some programs started up, and other programs were unaffected. Some machines integral to life in developed countries malfunctioned and generated false results due to the bug, but the issue was contained quickly enough to avoid pandemonium.

The rumor that the problem would significantly affect real life was unfounded, but it did cause panic leading up to the event. Because people were only just beginning to rely heavily on machinery to operate through daily life, a fear of machinery quickly spun a minor problem way out of proportion, validating to people distrusting of the digital age that the machines would lead to the end of civilization.