Todd McLellan’s Things Come Apart series features disassembled technology, both old and new, to explore our relationships with their disposable nature. As technology improves and we replace our gadgets at a rapid pace, what comes of the components that make it work? McLellan shoots each disassembled machine by dropping it from a platform, creating a stunning view of technology, inside out.

When you love something,  you want to know it loves you back. It’s why we look for ourselves in art: We want to see reflections of our struggles acknowledged, and we long to hear stories where we can be heroes. As a Black and Indian child of the 1990s, I was starving to see myself in the media I consumed; besides Will Smith, things were scarce.

In the late ’90s, video games had only started to feature voice acting and recognizably human characters. I wasn’t looking for a relatable dark-skinned character as much as I was looking for a game starring a human being and not a wise-cracking bobcat or a dragon who would become a fast friend.

Since then, much has evolved: From the graphical shifts of eight-bit and 16-bit pixelated characters to 3D polygonal character models in the mid-’90s, to the near-realism and embrace of virtual reality that has defined the 2010s, games of today are unrecognizable when compared to the Super Nintendo titles I played as a child. Today’s games industry rivals Hollywood in both profitability and, more notably, production values.

For the most part, technology is no longer a limiting factor for the creative vision of game developers. If you want photorealistic renditions of known actors, it can be done. Living paintings, playable novels, interactive horror movies: They all exist, and have active fanbases to boot. Almost anything can be created in a video game—and almost anyone. Blockbuster game franchises, such as the globe-trotting treasure hunts of the Uncharted series and the gritty alien warfare of the Gears of War titles, have used performance capture technology to bring life to their digital stars. Made famous via Andy Serkis’s turn as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy starting in 2001 (as well as his turn a decade later as Caesar in the Planet of the Apes trilogy), performance capture technology allows a physical actor’s performance on a soundstage to be used as the skeleton for a computer generated character in the final product.

The possibilities, as Serkis has demonstrated, are endless: Free from the limits of their physical bodies, talented actors can embody any role their skills can match.

As more games embraced performance capture technology, I was ready to see how many opportunities a truly colour- and race-blind casting process would create for people of colour in gaming. But my optimism may have been misplaced.

***

The use of performance capture in games has only become notable within the last decade, so examples are relatively limited. But even in its infancy, developers have used the technology in the same, questionable way: to cast white people as non-white characters.

In 2016’s Uncharted 4: A Thief ’s End and this year’s Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, two characters that are portrayed onscreen as women of colour—Nadine Ross, a steely South African mercenary, and Chloe Frazer, an Indian-Australian treasure hunter— were voiced and motion captured by white women, Laura Bailey and Claudia Black, respectively. In Gears of War 4, Kait Diaz, a determined Latina soldier, was performed by two people: The motion capture actor, who performs the physical movements of the character, was Aliyah O’Brien, a Canadian of Irish, Spanish, and Welsh descent; the voice actor was, once again, Laura Bailey.

The issue doesn’t resolve itself when we focus on purely voice acting roles in gaming; if anything, it gets worse. From the daughter of a slave fighting for freedom in the historical fantasy of Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, to an orphaned girl building a relationship with her adoptive guardian in the choose-your-own-adventure style storytelling of The Walking Dead, some of the most widely celebrated characters of colour in recent years (Aveline de Grandpré and Clementine) have been voiced by white women (Amber Goldfarb and Melissa Hutchinson).

To rely on technological advances to deliver diversity is to engage in active cruelty toward your hopes and dreams. On paper, technology that allows anyone to be anyone else should be the true equalizer in terms of diversity in casting. And in some cases, it has been: Merle Dandridge, an actor of Black and Asian descent, has performed the roles of Black-Asian women, Black women, and an elderly white woman, all in the last few years. But far more often, the games industry has used the smokescreen of digital performance to cast the same handful of mostly white actors across every role possible. It’s literally colourblind casting—there’s scarcely a person of colour to be seen.

***

Video games are a mongrel art form, inheriting the strengths and challenges of every medium that preceded them while dealing with problems that are wholly unique. It’s also a relatively young medium: Super Mario Bros. was released in 1985, Pong in 1972. Every decade brings a massive upgrade in technology that, in turn, transforms the idea of what a video game can be. Performance capture technology is even younger. The technique has its roots in rotoscoping, an animation method popularized by famed cartoonist Max Fleischer in 1915. He would trace over the individual frames of a live-action film reel to create a cartoon character that appeared to move with the fluidity of a human being (popularized in Talkartoons such as “Minnie the Moocher,” which featured the rotoscoped dance moves of Cab Calloway). Rotoscoping was later adopted by animation powerhouses, including Walt Disney, over the following half-century, but it was a time-consuming, labour-intensive process.

Motion capture technology as we know it today was developed as a tool in the field of biomechanics to track and analyze the movements of athletes in the late 20th century it was almost exclusively used for research and educational purposes. The core technology is largely the same: Pingpong ball-like sensors are attached to a bodysuit that the actor wears, allowing a stick-figure rendition of their exact movements to be recorded by a selection of cameras. Performance capture, however, specifically refers to an actor’s facial and finger movements being mapped to a digital character. While the technology has evolved and refined since those early days, the core mechanics remain the same. Today, motion capture studios can be found across Canada, working on projects across television, movies, and games.

But the games industry, like the tech world at large, has a systemic problem attracting and maintaining employees from diverse backgrounds. According to the International Game Developers Association’s (IDGA) 2015 developer satisfaction survey, 75 percent of developers polled identify as male, 73 percent identify as straight, and 76 percent identify as white, European, or Caucasian. Meanwhile, just three percent surveyed were Black, seven percent Latinx, and nine percent East Asian. This homogeneity becomes all the more apparent in a creative field. Video games offer a spectrum to tell unlimited stories in an ever-growing number of formats, yet they’re almost exclusively being told by a single group. This could be a matter of a group of creatives stumbling before they learn to walk, or it could be an accepted evil in the performance world. But it’s easy to trace a line from the lack of diversity behind the scenes to a lack of diverse characters being created, and in turn, a failure to hire and cast actors of colour in digital performance roles.

Canadian developers and motion capture studios are not exempt from this trend. Far Cry 4, an action-adventure romp set during a civil war in a fictional world based on Nepal, was developed by Ubisoft Montreal and Ubisoft Toronto and released in 2014. In a game stacked with people of colour (and actors of colour to match), it’s more than disappointing that both the lead character, Ajay Ghale (a Nepalese-American) and the primary antagonist, Pagan Min (a brutal monarch born in Hong Kong) were voiced and performed by white men (James A. Woods and Troy Baker). The same goes for Gears of War 4, by Vancouver-based developer The Coalition. Side characters of colour are voiced and motion performed by actors of colour—including some high profile names like Jimmy Smits and Justina Machado. But when it comes to lead characters (including the aforementioned Kait Diaz played by Laura Bailey), well-known white actors tend to show up as people of colour, such as Robin Atkin Downes as heroic Lieutenant Minh Young Kim.

None of these casting choices have created much backlash. While the issue of whitewashing in film has become enough of a social media talking point to result in actual change, the cultural footprint of gaming is too small, and too white, to generate anything close to that level of organized outrage. But that doesn’t mean gamers of colour don’t exist, and it’s no excuse for a young industry to inherit Hollywood’s racism and dismal view of diversity. It’s not too late to believe we can do better.

Then again, the nature of this issue is complicated by the layers of technology inherent to the problem. The #whitewashOUT movement led by American comedian Margaret Cho in response to the release of Ghost in the Shell in early 2017 was easy to grasp: A Japanese character named Major Motoko Kusanagi in a movie set in Japan, based on a Japanese franchise made by Japanese people, was played by Scarlett Johansson. The grievance there is clear and obvious, and a social movement is born.

But digital performance? Voice acting? This is the realm of thought exercises and appeals toward devil’s advocacy. If Black people can sound white, why can’t white people provide the voices for Black characters? If a white woman can speak with a convincing Mandarin-accented English lilt, why should she be excluded from auditioning? All these questions and more can be found in any online message board or Twitter thread about the Uncharted controversy, and they’re not easy to answer. But solutions can be found, if you know where to look.

***

The closest neighbour to performance acting is voice acting, and Roger King, president of Ethnic Voice Talent (EVT)—an agency that gathers voice actors across dozens of accents and languages and helps get them cast for the right roles—has been working in that world for decades. King, a voice actor who traded days in the recording booth for the responsibilities of a talent agent, started EVT to address a growing demand in the market for non-white voices—not just professionally-trained voice actors speaking non-English languages, but accented English roles as well.

The majority of King’s clients work in voice-over in radio ads and narration. But he also casts for animated programs and video games. In the 13 years that EVT has existed, King has seen a marked change in how his industry, and society as a whole, treats the idea of a non-white voice. “Back then, [casting directors] would want character actors to put on these stereotypical voices, with a subtle racist undertone,” says King. A character with an accent would almost always be the butt of the joke in a comedic situation, as if saying “HERE COMES AN INDIAN MAN!” is a punchline in and of itself. “Now, there is little tolerance for anyone trying to ‘put an accent on.’ Casting breakdowns will specifically ask for authentic accents only,” he says.

The story of diversity in the voice acting industry is the history of North American immigration in microcosm. When King first started working as a voice actor, there was demand for ethnic voices predominantly from Europe; today, that demand is skewed toward Asian and Middle Eastern voices, as well as readings in accented English over non-English dialects. Likewise, earlier non-English voice acting was mainly created by minority communities, for those same communities. Over time, non-minority businesses clued into the idea that people who speak Urdu as their first language still need to buy car insurance, and that a mattress ad narrated in Chinese-accented English could draw in new customers.

The push for race-accurate casting came from a few different areas. First, practicality: The advantage of having an actual Jamaican person voice a character over a white guy with a Bob Marley accent is that your intended audience can identify and trust the authenticity of your product. Second, technology: The internet has reduced the cost of entry into voice work to the price of a quality USB microphone and a pop filter. With literally every voice actor in the world within reach, the biggest limiting factor in a project’s ability to generate a diverse cast is the willingness to seek out authentic voices. And technology works both ways—if you fall short in terms of diverse casting, the internet can bring passionate feedback into your home in a big way.

But the third, and final change in the world of casting is the world itself. “There is a genuine interest in cultural sensitivity and respect in our society now,” King says.

I spend far too much time on Twitter to share King’s optimism, but I can’t argue with his position: Within decades, he has watched his industry go from cartoony, Apu-from-The Simpsons caricatures of English speakers with accents to principled projects that will outright refuse to cast voice actors of different races from the characters they are portraying on screen.

So if the voice acting industry is making impressive strides toward respect and authenticity in diversity, why are video games getting it wrong time and time again?

“I don’t know if people in the video game industry are getting lazy and not reaching out to the right groups,” King speculates. “It’s 2017.” I’m inclined to agree with him; if you spend enough time following voice and performance actors in the gaming industry, a handful of the same names start to pop up. They’re all beloved veteran actors, they can inhabit any role, and they’re considered a sure bet when it comes to nailing a key performance for an important character—a crucial factor in an industry that’s cost-intensive and risk averse.

They’re also all white people who performed the voice and motion capture for characters of colour. Actors portraying their own race: It’s the riskiest creative decision of all.

***

Matters of diversity and erasure in the media are only fringe issues if you’ve never felt erased before. Those who have understand the slow insanity of watching shows and movies, reading books and graphic novels, and playing games where there’s no one like you. Unlimited imagination, infinite worlds—and not one where you exist.

What does that say about the average escapist fantasy? How can you escape to a place where you’re not just unwelcome, but you literally don’t exist?

If you’re anything like me, you learn to compromise. I didn’t look like Indiana Jones, but I shared his love of history, archaeology, and old-timey maps. So I chose to see myself in the movies and love them, even though those same movies would see me as a savage devourer of monkey brains. I often felt like a famished mental gymnast, accepting minor injustices and cutting stereotypes as I constantly scavenged for better representations of myself in the media.

Video games as I recognize them today are slightly older than I am. They were supposed to be better, free of the sinkholes that the art forms they emulate have found themselves mired inside. Instead, they are only as flawed or flawless as their creators: a workforce of overwhelmingly white, straight men.

This is how we can have games of infinite narrative potential that still base the majority of their gameplay around shooting and killing the Other. It’s how games can let you create your own character from a select palette of skin tones, but fail to have the facial features and hair options of people of colour—a small detail, but one that reiterates the idea that to a team of graphic animators, my natural-born hair is harder to create and animate than a race of toad-faced alien behemoths.

Most of all, it’s how the miraculous ability to cast any actor in any role becomes a parlour trick; a fun way to turn entire races into a series of digital masks for white actors. It doesn’t have to be this way—the voice acting industry is a testament to that.

But it’s hard to watch a white actress receive universal acclaim for her role as a strong Black woman and wonder if the games industry solved its diversity problem by removing the one variable factor: people of colour.

Screenshots from the forthcoming indie video game Guerrilla Gardening

Can a gardening video game change the world for the better?

In a medium that features an overwhelming focus on war-themed shoot-’em-ups, a video game about social change through gardening is a definite change of pace. And if the duo behind Guerrilla Gardening have their way, it will also inspire players to raise a trowel and start sowing the seeds of revolution themselves.

In development for nearly two years, Guerrilla Gardening features a unique mix of stealth and puzzle gameplay. Your goal is to overthrow an evil dictatorship by inspiring citizens to make a change. To do this, you’ll have to plant flowers around government propaganda to make the citizens happy, while avoiding the ever-vigilant police.

According to artist-designer Miguel Sternberg, the idea came from a blog post about the burgeoning guerrilla gardening movement.

“I had already sort of been thinking about games that were about protest and social change and street art,” he explains. “Then I read about guerrilla gardening and I was like, ‘Oh, wait, this basically takes all of the things I’ve been sketching about in my notebook as ideas and lets me put them all into one game.’”

Along with his partner, programmer Andrew Pilkiw, Sternberg hopes the game’s theme will help their company, Spooky Squid Games, reach new audiences.

“Like most indie developers, we’re doing it for ourselves, making the sort of game we’d like to play,” says Sternberg. “But I also think that along with hitting the hardcore indie gaming set, it will also hit people who are interested in the theme: the fact that it’s a gardening game.”

As for when Guerrilla Gardening will finally be released, the team says simply, “When it’s done.”

Online communities bring together people who would never talk in real life. Illustration by Matt Daley.

Though you can count the joys of graduate school on one hand—without even using all of your fingers—spending an evening with like-minded friends just chatting is definitely one of them. As the drinks flow and discussions stretch late into the night, it’s easy to feel the glow of both comfort and belonging.

But as much as I love the company of my peers, it’s hard not to notice that we usually talk about the same things in the same way. You know: Mad Men is great but problematic, and, well, what’s the deal with this Harper guy? Still, even the most polite among us have to admit that, in the interest of challenging complacency, blunt disagreement is an occasional necessity—and when everyone comes from more or less the same background, that can be hard.

The internet, that grand messy swirl of ideas, might seem to offer an answer. But alas, it suffers the opposite problem: on the web, genteel discussion is about as rare as the average unicorn. Exchange is notoriously confrontational, irrational, and pointless. Users are always warned to never feed “the trolls”—the online agitators whose sole purpose is to provoke and annoy, and who frequently capsize the entire conversation.

But if you are looking for discussion that will challenge and provoke without devolving into mudslinging, there is hope—and it comes in the unlikeliest of places. It’s called the “off-topic section.”

Case in point: it isn’t exactly something I’m proud of, but I spend a good deal of time on NeoGAF, an online message board that bills itself as the premiere video game community on the web. It may sound a bit like boasting about “the diveyest dive bar on the block,” but NeoGAF is, surprisingly, a bit of a paragon for both the best and worst of online dialogue.

Most of the chatter is about the stated subject of the site—video games. Forum moderators constantly struggle to keep these conversations on topic. As a result, NeoGAF, like almost every one of millions of web forums out there, has an “off-topic section” where members can blow off steam and rant about almost anything they want. Spend a bit of time there, and you’ll find people from radically different viewpoints actually talking about things they might hardly dare to in real life.

“A question for gay guys: would sex with a woman disgust you?” reads one naive post. “Muslim racism in Norway!” loudly claims another. But while that may sound like a breeding ground for ignorance—and occasionally is—a lot of the time, it’s the opposite. Recently, when a poster ominously linked to a piece about the failure of some newly black-owned farms in South Africa, I cringed; after all, Canadian public discourse and the web have very different standards of what’s acceptable to say, and even in a moderated space like NeoGAF, prejudice isn’t uncommon. Instead, what transpired was a generally reasoned discussion of race-based policies in South Africa, and multiculturalism in general. By the end of it, people committed to absolute ideals of equality had to admit that there were complex reasons behind things like cultural relativism or the machinations of politics and history.

Similarly, in those other discussions, a teenage boy, unfamiliar with simple truths about the fluid spectrum of sexuality, learned some valuable lessons, while a poster with a set of Islamophobic beliefs had his assumptions and discourse soundly and smartly critiqued. In engaging with viewpoints they might not otherwise hear, people were having their beliefs and views challenged in a way that would not have happened offline.

NeoGAF’s community formed around shared interests rather than a set of shared beliefs. As a result, it is composed of a staggeringly diverse group of people: young and old, male and female, left to right, and everything in between. Few things capture the site’s heterogeneity like the fact that, as I type this, a thread about the low median income for single black women sits right under one simply entitled “Boobs!”

This isn’t limited to video game communities. The same basic dynamics apply to web forums the world over, be they about urban affairs, technology, or craft-making, and in these quiet, nerdy corners of the web, people who may not otherwise talk are actually conversing.

In the offline world, this radical mixture rarely happens. Peer-groups often form because friends think the same way, and many of us spend our time surrounded by the like-minded, comfortable in the feeling that what we believe and know is right and true. It’s not so much that familiarity breeds contempt, but that it simply breeds more familiarity—what we might less generously term “a rut.” The off-topic sections of message boards offer something more hopeful: people who have gathered around a topic that unites them often proceed to talk about the topics that don’t.

Find a community that is tight-knit and with a few bright lights, and you could find real, diverse engagement often lacking in the offline world. And if you’re lucky, rather than wasting your energy feeding the trolls, you might end up nourishing your brain instead.

After six years as an online-only webseries, Pure Pwnage — that’s “ownage”, or “supreme dominance of anyone in anything” in square-talk  — invades real television tonight when it premieres on cable channel Showcase.

A mockumentary-style series about an obsessive Toronto gamer and his entourage of equally oddball friends that began its run in 2004, Pure Pwnage bears more than a passing resemblance to Trailer Park Boys: the outrageous characterizations, the elaborate hijinks, the wall-to-wall profanity. It’s also unapologetically nerdy, and seldom stops to explain its elaborate “teh interwebs” vocabulary. And it’s a hit — millions of viewers have downloaded the episodes available for free from the website, and hundreds turn out for theatrical screenings in Toronto and elsewhere. Showcase — to me, showing a level of clue-having-ness unusual among Canadian broadcasters — has plucked the show from the web and given the creators a half-hour slot to do their thing. Whether the magic translates to a general TV audience, well, we’ll see. But there’s going to be a lot of swearing, monitor-humping, and headshots along the way.

Here’s season 1, episode 1 of Pure Pwnage for you n00bs in the crowd:

The current issue of This features Andrew Webster’s profile of Canada’s independent videogame scene, which came to mind recently when I stumbled across Lose/Lose, a video-game/conceptual-art-project that adds some real risk to the normally consequence-free world of blowing up aliens. When you play Lose/Lose, the alien attackers are stand-ins for actual files on your computer. When you blow them up, those files are deleted. If the aliens blow you up, the game deletes itself and you have to download it again. I didn’t play it, because, well, that’s not really the point. It’s a thought experiment.

The game’s creator, Zach Gage, explains the concept:

Although touching aliens will cause the player to lose the game, and killing aliens awards points, the aliens will never actually fire at the player. This calls into question the player’s mission, which is never explicitly stated, only hinted at through classic game mechanics. Is the player supposed to be an aggressor? Or merely an observer, traversing through a dangerous land?

Why do we assume that because we are given a weapon and awarded for using it, that doing so is right?

That’s a pretty explicit question, and a politically charged one—the kind that videogames have traditionally avoided.

As an art form, games seem to remain ideologically inert in comparison to other media. Partly that’s a function of the cost of developing them. When you spend millions building a blockbuster game, you can’t afford to turn it into a searing commentary on morality in pop culture; stuff just has to blow up real good. That’s true of film and music too, other high-capital undertakings that can’t afford to alienate the audience. But in those fields, independent, aggressively avant-garde projects still flourish on the margins. With video games, even the tiny indie producers seldom seem to venture into serious commentary on social, political, or economic issues. It’s all “dance dance” and no “revolution.” There’s the “serious games” genre, but those seem more like educational games, and less focused on commentary.

Does anyone have suggestions for video games (any platform) that have real political content? Who is the Brecht of X-Box? The Godard of GameBoy? The Breillat of Wii? Suggest them in the comments section below or email them to editor at this magazine dot ca.

Gameplay in Critter Crunch for the Playstation 3. Image courtesy Capybara Games.

On May 5, 2006, 35 Toronto area video-game developers converged in one spot with a particular goal in mind: to create an entire game, start to finish, in just three days. It was a daunting task, but in the end 10 completed games were assembled, while seven others came just short of the deadline. The Toronto Game Jam—or TOJam as it is more commonly known—is now in its fourth year and is a superb showcase of the ever-growing independent game development community that has formed in Canada’s biggest city.

Canada has been at the forefront of the games industry for some time, but, in traditional Canadian fashion, has been rather quiet about it. Cities like Vancouver and Montreal are home to some of the biggest development studios on the planet; meanwhile a lack of major studios has made Toronto a hotbed for independent game developers.

One of the games to come out of that very first TOJam, titled Bubble Thing, was created in its entirety by just one man: Jonathan Mak. Mak followed this up with a game called Everyday Shooter, which he describes as “an album of games exploring the expressive power of abstract shooters.” In many ways it plays like a traditional arcade game, but its abstract visuals and organic sound design made people take notice. This included folks at Sony Computer Entertainment, who upon seeing the game at the 2007 Independent Games Festival (IGF), asked Mak to create a version of Everyday Shooter for the PlayStation 3, where it became a critical and commercial success.

This story isn’t unique. In fact, a Toronto-based developer is almost always in the running at the IGF. Metanet Software grabbed the Audience Choice award in 2005 for its game N, while Capybara Games snagged two awards in 2008 for their puzzle game Critter Crunch. Both studios have gone on to create new versions of these awardwinning games for traditional gaming platforms. “Toronto really doesn’t have any ‘large’ studios,” Capybara co-founder Nathan Vella explains. “There just weren’t a lot of opportunities to get a job in gaming here, assuming you go the traditional route.”

Because of this, Vella and several other members of the Toronto chapter of the International Game Developers Association eventually decided to forge their own path, and thus Capybara was born. They started out small, working mostly on projects for mobile phones, but have since expanded to create titles for the PS3, iPhone, and Nintendo DS.

Vella also believes that the early success of pioneers like Metanet and Mak has a lot to do with the current state of the city’s development scene. “They made awesome games that got critical acclaim and commercial success,” he says. “They helped put Toronto on the map, and inspired a lot of people who maybe didn’t think it was possible to survive as an indie here.”

It also doesn’t hurt that government programs like the Ontario Media Development Corporation help to fund just these sorts of companies.

“Metanet certainly wouldn’t be here without support from the OMDC, who have allowed us to travel to industry events and realize our ideas by providing us with funding,” co-founders Mare Sheppard and Raigan Burns explain via email. “Other funding through Telefilm and the Arts Councils has also been important. It’s a great city to be a small games developer in—there is so much enthusiasm and support that makes it possible to get closer to success.”

The landscape may soon change though, as Ubisoft, one of the largest game publishers in the world, will be opening up a studio in the city’s downtown core by the end of this year. The studio is expected to create 800 new jobs over the next decade and is costing the Ontario government $263 million. What effect this will have on the thriving indie community remains to be seen, but it doesn’t seem to faze the Metanet duo of Sheppard and Burns.

“We indies will keep doing what we do.”

Nova Scotia NDP Premier Darrell Dexter has a lot of reading to do, including This Magazine. Illustration by David Anderson.

The September-October 2009  issue of This Magazine should now be in subscribers’ mailboxes (subscribers always get the magazine early, and you can too), and will be for sale on your local newsstand coast-to-coast this week. All the articles in the issue will be made available online in the weeks ahead, though, so keep checking back for more. We suggest subscribing to our RSS feed to ensure you never miss a new article going online, following us on Twitter or becoming a fan on Facebook for updates, new articles and other tasty links.

On the cover of the September-October issue is Anthony Fenton‘s special investigation into the world of Canadian private security firms, armoured-car manufacturers and oil companies that are profiting from the chaos in Iraq. While Canadians are justly proud of the fact that we declined to join the misbegotten “coalition of the willing” that occupied Iraq in 2003, Fenton finds that in many ways — politically, economically, militarily — Canada’s involvement in Iraq today is deeper than ever. Three years after the legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada, Paul Gallant surveys the terrain of LGBT activism and finds it increasingly deserted. Marriage certificates in hand, middle-class gays and lesbians have drifted away from the movement, he finds, while the underfunded and burnt-out activists left behind say there’s still plenty of work to do. And reporting from Israel, Grant Shilling meets the beach bums, peace activists, and former soldiers who believe that the region’s world-class surfing could be one way to bring Israelis and Palestinians together—if only he can deliver a load of wetsuits to Gaza.

There’s plenty more, including Paul McLaughlin‘s interview with new Nova Scotia NDP premier Darrell Dexter; Sienna Anstis profiles the remarkable long-distance relationship between the University of Manitoba’s microbiology lab and a sex-worker clinic in Nairobi, Kenya; Andrew Webster meets the  independent videogame designers who make Canada an increasingly important player in an emerging art form; Hicham Safieddine says that during the election uproar over the summer, Western mainstream media got it wrong about Iran—again; Soraya Roberts finds that, in choosing Veronica over Betty, freckle-faced comic-book icon Archie Andrews has subverted seven decades of cultural expectations; RM Vaughan tests the limits of his solidarity during Toronto’s great municipal strike of summer 2009 as the litterbox threatens his sanity; Laura Kusisto digs into the real numbers behind Saskatchewan’s plan to pay $20,000 to recent graduates who choose to settle there; Souvankham Thammavongsa sends a postcard about the strange nighttime happenings in Marfa, Texas; and Darryl Whetter asks why, when 80 percent of Canadians live in cities, so much of our fiction takes place down on the farm.

PLUS: Chris Jai Centeno on University of Toronto budget cuts; Emily Hunter on overfishing and the seafood industry; Jenn Hardy on the DivaCup; Milton Kiang on better ways to recycle e-waste; Navneet Alang on microblogging service Tumblr; Jason Anderson on the Toronto International Film Festival; Sarah Colgrove on Len Dobbin, the Montreal jazz scene’s most important audience member; Kelli Korducki reviews Who’s Your Daddy?: And other writings on queer parenting; and Graham F. Scott on net neutrality and the CRTC.

With new poetry by Sandra Ridley and Lillian Nećakov, and a new short story by Kathy Friedman.