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Crunching the numbers

• Near Warrenton, Missouri, Picture Cave is home to a significant amount of Native American artwork, and the spot is sacred to members of the Osage Nation, whose ancestors have a 1,300-year history there. In an auction on Tuesday, an unidentified bidder pledged $2.2 million to buy the cave and the 43 acres of land surrounding it.
• This week, hundreds of University of Kansas students protested fraternities and the university’s response to sexual assault on campus. Since the university reformed how it responds to sexual assault six years ago, the number of rapes reported to campus police has not gone down.
• Since 2013, the Tampa Police Department has had a program that encourages landlords at more than 100 apartment complexes to evict tenants who have been arrested or stopped by officers. A Tampa Bay Times investigation discovered that dozens of the renters were targeted by the program for charges that were later dropped. More than 100 were arrested on misdemeanors, and 90% of the renters the program flagged were Black. (Go deeper: How misdemeanors can upend people’s lives, causing them to lose their homes or eligibility for public housing.)

In video game credits, some workers are left out

The unending scroll of closing credits on video games is about as anticlimactic as closing a tub of cottage cheese. But unlike cottage cheese, which is an unassuming, straightforward dairy product, the way video game credits are configured (and who they exclude) is a murky business.

Last year, Forest Lassman wrote in Kotaku that the gaming industry doesn’t have standards for who is credited for working on a game. For one of my favorites, “Red Dead Redemption 2,” more than 1,000 people who worked on the game weren’t included in the credits.

Sometimes developers are only named in a “special thanks” section, which I always assumed was for people who had brought the staff some stellar doughnuts or provided advice on how to execute a really cool spin move. I didn’t think they were actually paid contributors to the game.

This week, Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett reported that a new first-person shooter, “Deathloop,” has credits that omit some developers and place others under the “special thanks” category. He writes: “Imagine surveying the breadth of effort that went into making a video game and deciding to choose whose hard work to honour and whose to ignore. Predictably, those left out are usually contractors, testers, outsourced studios and former employees no longer with the company at the time a game ships.”

New from BigIfTrue.org

In seven states, landlords can evict tenants for filing health or safety complaints about poor housing conditions. Housing advocates say this deters complaints and enables slumlords to cycle renters in and out of unlivable properties. Some fast facts:

• Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Wyoming have housing laws that allow landlords to retaliate against renters.
• Aside from eviction, retaliation can include not renewing a lease or making unaffordable rent increases.
• When landlords retaliate, it’s often in response to their tenants filing complaints with a local health department or another code enforcement agency. Without laws to prevent this kind of retaliation, “It’s just a very dicey position to be in as a tenant,” said Eric Dunn, director of litigation for the National Housing Law Project. “I think a lot of people would more likely be deterred from making those types of complaints, which really is against public policy because the reason we have building codes and health codes (is) every rental property should be safe, habitable and appropriate for people to live in.”

Read more here.

Thanks for dropping in on Hard Reset! Get in touch: bryant@bigiftrue.org and 405-990-0988.
 
– Mollie Bryant
Founder and editor, BigIfTrue.org