March 11th, 2013Top Story Leaked Star Wars Game Is 'Predecessor' To Battlefront III, Source Says By Jason Schreier Last October, we saw a listing for Star Wars: First Assault, an unannounced Xbox Live Arcade game developed by LucasArts. Today, Kotaku can reveal that Star Wars: First Assault is a downloadable multiplayer shooter that was originally slated for release this spring. The game supports up to 16 players—one eight-person team of rebels and one eight-person team of Stormtroopers—as they face off on Star Wars worlds like Bespin and Tatooine. And according to one person familiar with the project, First Assault is "step zero" to the heavily-rumored, highly-anticipated Star Wars: Battlefront III. If First Assault sells well—assuming it is released at all—the third Battlefront could be next. *** A few weeks ago, Kotaku reported on the status of Star Wars 1313, a game that could be in trouble thanks to unrest and uncertainty at LucasArts, the storied studio that has developed or published every official Star Wars video game to date. We mentioned a Call of Duty-style first-person shooter codenamed "Trigger." That's First Assault. And according to our source, who is familiar with the project but says he is "no longer familiar with the goings-on" at LucasArts, this game is a downloadable "predecessor" to Battlefront III—part of the studio's strategy to show that there's a market for Star Wars shooters running on the Unreal Engine. The story of Star Wars: Battlefront III is long and well-documented. Commissioned as the third game in the Battlefront shooter series, Battlefront III has bounced from developer to developer over the past few years. Although LucasArts has yet to officially announce the game, leaked footage and images show what could have been, and development studio Free Radical has claimed the game was 99% finished when LucasArts killed it. Star Wars: First Assault, our source says, would lead up to Battlefront III. This new Battlefront would use nothing from the Battlefront III that has already been in production at studios like Free Radical and Slant Six, our source says. Instead, LucasArts would build Battlefront III based on code from First Assault. According to our source, a small team has already been prototyping vehicles for Battlefront III. Current code allows you to fly a TIE Fighter or ride an AT-ST walker. There are no vehicles in First Assault, nor are there Jedi. LucasArts intentionally decided not to use the Battlefront name so expectations wouldn't be too high, our source says. And the game is almost done. But Star Wars: First Assault may never actually make it out of the studio. Last September, when executives at LucasFilm—the parent company of LucasArts—found out that Disney had signed an agreement to purchase the company, things got murky. LucasFilm froze all hiring and new game announcements, our source says. They had planned to announce First Assault and launch a closed beta by the end of September—which explains the Xbox listing leak on October 1—and First Assault was supposed to be out this spring. So since September, employees at LucasArts have been working on the game with no knowledge as to whether or not it will actually come out. According to our source, LucasArts is "bleeding talent" as employees wait to see what executives at Disney and LucasFilm want to do with First Assault and other games the studio is working on. The status of First Assault—like the status of Star Wars 1313 and other projects that LucasArts is currently working on—remains unclear today. The new direction of LucasFilm is also unclear—just today, the company announced that they would no longer be releasing new episodes of the Clone Wars television show on Cartoon Network. We've reached out to LucasArts for comment and will update should we hear back from them. For now, our source says, the only way to get games like First Assault out of carbonite might be for Star Wars fans to speak up. "Fans should tell Disney/Lucas loud and clear they don't want shitty titles from random developers; they want games to be taken seriously, and they will only pay for quality," the source said. "I believe that if Disney/Lucas lets LucasArts die, it means the death of Star Wars as a storied game franchise is right behind it."

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March 11th, 2013Top Story 'Little Twerp ... Get a Life': The New Yorker's Jon Lee Anderson Thinks He's Somebody on Twitter By Tom Scocca Jon Lee Anderson, a writer for a weekly magazine called the New Yorker, got angry on Twitter today. A reader with the Twitter name of Mitch Lake (@mlake9) had tweeted at Anderson (@jonleeanderson) to dispute a claim of fact in Anderson's online story about the death of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez. Anderson had written that Chavez had left his country as "one of the world's most oil-rich but socially unequal countries," and Lake countered that in fact Venezuela was the second-least unequal country in the Americas. Lake was rude, using the internet idiom "wtf," which is an abbreviation for "What the fuck?" Whatever high ground may have belonged to Anderson, however, turned into a mudslide within the next 140 characters: @mlake9WTF indeed. You, little twerp, are someone who has sent 25,700 Tweets for a grand total of 169 followers. Get a life. — Jon Lee Anderson (@jonleeanderson) March 8, 2013 Click to view There's probably a useful conversation to be had about Jon Lee Anderson's recent coverage of Venezuela and Chavez. His work is marked by weird internal stress points of fact, where the story he seems to be trying to tell about Chavez fails to align with the history of the country. In his January profile of Venezuela and its then-dying president, "Slumlord," he described Chavez's Caracas as a tragically fallen city, but located the "height of its allure" in 1983, or 16 years and six presidencies before Chavez ever took power. Likewise the Tower of David, the unfinished high-rise overrun by squatters that he presents as the monument to the Chavez era, was by Anderson's own account aborted in 1993—still six years and a few presidencies before Chavez—during a collapse of the country's banking system. Given the weird amounts of atavistic propaganda in American news coverage of Chavez, it felt as if Anderson hadn't quite gotten himself clear on the question of how broken Venezuela really is, or to what extent that brokenness is Chavez's work. But we're not having that conversation right now, because Lake was too busy telling Anderson to "fact check your article dick" and Anderson was telling Lake to "clean your mouth out" (and, again, to "get a life"), and then they were both sighing to their respective friendly Twitter audiences: "Depres 2 c how pple want 2heckle w/out rreading"; "I guess people don't like to be called out when they make a mistake." The trouble here is that though Twitter can be a great medium for getting into fights with people, Jon Lee Anderson went in with a common and damaging misapprehension of the rules. He was the guy who asks, Don't you know who I am? And the answer to that question, on Twitter, is: You're one more dipshit with a Twitter account. Nothing more, nothing less. The internet in general and Twitter in particular are a challenge to people who've succeeded under older standards of prestige. All these bloggers and amateurs and God knows who, throwing words around—throwing words at you, for pity's sake. Many of them are genuinely rude and dumb and unqualified, by most standards, to say anything to you. Yet you Twitter-search your own name, and there they are, taking it in vain. Who are they? Answer: They also are dipshits with Twitter accounts. You are free to ignore them. It is entirely within your power to ignore them. You are also free to retweet them, without comment, and let the world judge. You are free to disagree with them politely or severely or obscenely, as the mood strikes you, and have a nice dialogue or brawl, as much as your writerly powers will allow. You are free to block them, even, if you want to formally concede a piece of the internet to them. What you can't do is appeal to your credentials. If Jon Lee Anderson wants to exercise his superiority over Mitch Lake, he can write a blog post for the New Yorker and have it read by thousands of people. He can't do it by telling Mitch Lake on Twitter that Mitch Lake doesn't matter, that he's a "little twerp." Get a life? He's typing on Twitter ... just like you are. One hundred forty characters apiece. No difference there. Reminding Lake that he only had 169 Twitter followers was the saddest gambit of all. Jon Lee Anderson has 17,866 followers. And Kim Kardashian has, as I write this, 17,489,892 followers. That is: Jon Lee Anderson is 1/1,000 as important on Twitter, by his own standard, as Kim Kardashian. He is 10 times closer to Mitch Lake than he is to Kim Kardashian. Or at least he was before he called Lake a twerp. Now Lake is up to 210 followers. [Image by jim Cooke.]

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March 11th, 2013Top Story How to Choose Your Battles and Fight for What Actually Matters By Adam Dachis Any moment in life can turn into a heated argument, but most shouldn't. Conversely, you may not have the energy or confidence to stand up for yourself when it matters. Whether you fight too much or too little, you have a problem choosing your battles. Here's how to choose your battles and get what you want when it actually matters. I was raised by a devil's advocate father and a mother who likes to stand up for the little guy, so I'm naturally inclined to take the opposite side of most points...whether I agree with them or not. While it's good to see things from other perspectives, it's horrible to argue them all. You can forego stress for yourself and others by approaching conflict both at the right times and more effectively. While I've learned a few things from my experience of changing my ways as a conflict-seeking individual, I'm no expert. I spoke with relationship and family therapist Roger S. Gil to find the best approaches to better conflict. In this post we'll discuss how it's done. Learn Where Your Line of Conflict Should Lie We all feel anger, but whether or not we act on it depends on a number of factors. Among them, confidence and forethought play a large role. Sometimes our anger gets the best of us, and we argue without thinking it through. Other times, we don't feel confident enough to argue effectively when we should. To start solving this problem, you need to find where you draw the line between letting something go and engaging in conflict. Finding your "line" means considering how others will react to your choices and how you feel about those results. For example, if you avoid most battles and you're perfectly happy with that, your line may be fine just where it is. If you fight too many battles and upset a lot of people in the process, however, you probably need a behavioral shift. Roger suggests keeping track and analyzing what happened to figure out what's problematic and what isn't: I have often had clients use journals or log sheets as ways of doing a "post-game analysis" of days where battles (or potential battles) occurred. Each entry should say what happened, how they did/didn't deal with the situation, the outcome of how they dealt with it, and whether or not they liked the outcome. More often than not, similarities emerge across the various sections of each entry after about seven to 10 of them (e.g. they may notice that they tend to pick battles more often with family members instead of colleagues). There are usually patterns among the type of situations we ignore/confront, the people that push our buttons, and how we chose to deal with the situations. Desired changes to our style of choosing battles can then be identified after we have our behavioral baseline. When figuring out where you need to adjust, look for patterns. When you start to see yours emerge, you'll find it much easier to make the necessary behavioral changes and feel better about the battles you pick. What You Need to Consider When Choosing Your Battles Finding your line of conflict makes the largest difference, and your style of conflict is a personal decision. However, a few commonalities exist in most approaches. Roger suggests you should ask yourself this question every time: "is the situation so distressing that it needs to be addressed?" Your answer will help you avoid undesirable reactions: Whether you're avoidant or aggressive, it's important to have an answer to this question before deciding how to act upon the situation. Taking the time to answer the question should also help us avoid knee-jerk reactions that usually contain more emotion than rational thinking. Asking yourself a question, in general, works well because it makes you think. This is especially important when you're feeling emotional. If your emotions get in the way of logic, questions will help draw you back to reality. However, your emotions aren't the only part of the equation. Roger stresses that you ought to consider your relationship with the other party as well: Is it a relative, employer, friend, etc.? We may have to put up with some stuff if the person is an authority figure (as long as we aren't being abused, that is). With people that are close to us, the decision to act or ignore isn't so simple. One has to develop a sense for when choosing a battle with that person is healthy versus harmful and a sense for when ignoring it is acceptable versus enabling negative behavior. Unfortunately developing both senses takes trial and error since only experience can teach each one of us how to get along in our respective worlds. When you think about your approach and consider the other party, you'll have a much easier time deciding whether to fight or whether to just let something go. Fight Constructively You shouldn't fight any battle if you can't do so constructively. If your goal is to hurt or just express your anger, you're fighting for the wrong reasons. Every single argument you have ought to aim to improve an undesirable situation. Roger explains how to do this: Another thing I tell my clients when helping them learn how to choose their battles is to remain "solution-focused". In other words, "don't pick a battle or ignore a situation until you know what outcome you'd like." Keeping your eyes on the solution can help you avoid becoming embroiled in an emotional conflict and it can help avoidant people push toward change instead of listening to their fears. When focusing on solutions, a person should consider whether or not their desired solution is fair to all parties involved and the points where they are willing to make concessions. Focusing on an ideal outcome for all parties turns a battle into more of a productive debate, and that's exactly the goal you ought to have for each and every argument. Practice Makes Perfect Most skills require practice before you're any good. The importance of practice in choosing your battles cannot be understated: it is exceptionally important. While we can offer up tips and suggestions, changing your behavior and understanding the behavior of others requires effort. You'll need to try and fail a lot, then learn from your experiences. You can't walk away after reading this post and expect your conflict aptitude to rise to genius levels. That said, these tips should give you a starting point to choosing your battles better. Use them as a starting point, track your behavior, and practice. When things start getting better and you feel less stress, you'll know you're on the right path. Most of the pixel art by Sean Warton.

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