title: Los Angeles County, California

text: Venice Beach is a popular attraction whose Muscle Beach used to attract throngs of tourists admiring "hardbodies". Today, it is more arts-centered. Santa Monica's pier is a well known tourist spot, famous for its Ferris wheel and bumper car rides, which were featured in the introductory segment of the television sitcom "Three's Company". Further north in Pacific Palisades one finds the beaches used in the television series "Baywatch". The fabled Malibu, home of many film and television stars, lies west of it.


title: Los Angeles County, California

text: In the mountain, canyon, and desert areas one may find Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park, where many old Westerns were filmed. Mount Wilson Observatory in the San Gabriel Mountains is open for the public to view astronomical stars from its telescope, now computer-assisted. Many county residents find relaxation in water skiing and swimming at Castaic Lake Recreation Area – the county's largest park by area – as well as enjoying natural surroundings and starry nights at Saddleback Butte State Park in the eastern Antelope Valley – California State Parks' largest in area within the county. The California Poppy Reserve is located in the western Antelope Valley and shows off the State's flower in great quantity on its rolling hills every spring.


title: Los Angeles County, California

text: Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), located in the Westchester district, is the primary commercial airport for commercial airlines in the county and the Greater Los Angeles Area. LAX is operated by Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA), an agency of the City of Los Angeles.


title: Los Angeles County, California

text: Los Angeles is a major freight-railroad transportation center, largely due to the large volumes of freight moving in and out of the county's sea port facilities. The ports are connected to the downtown rail yards and to the main lines of Union Pacific and Burlington Northern Santa Fe headed east via a grade-separated, freight rail corridor known as the Alameda Corridor.


title: Los Angeles County, California

text: Union Station is also the primary hub for Metrolink commuter rail, which serves much of the Greater Los Angeles Area.


title: Los Angeles County, California

text: Light rail, subway (heavy rail), and long-distance bus service are all provided by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro).


title: Los Angeles County, California

text: The county's two main seaports are the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach. Together they handle over a quarter of all container traffic entering the United States, making the complex the largest and most important port in the country, and the third-largest port in the world by shipping volume.


title: Los Angeles County, California

text: The Port of Los Angeles is the largest cruise ship center on the West Coast, handling more than 1 million passengers annually.


title: Los Angeles County, California

text: The Port of Long Beach is home to the Sea Launch program, which uses a floating launch platform to insert payloads into orbits that would be difficult to attain from existing land-based launch sites.


title: Los Angeles County, California

text: Catalina Express ferries link the Catalina Island city of Avalon to the mainland at San Pedro and Long Beach, as well as Dana Point in Orange County.


title: Los Angeles County, California

text: There are 88 incorporated cities in Los Angeles County. According to the 2018 Estimate, the most populous are:


title: Josh Lucas

text: Joshua Lucas Easy Dent Maurer (born June 20, 1971) is an American actor. He is best known for his roles in various films, including "American Psycho" (2000), "You Can Count on Me" (2000), "The Deep End" (2001), "A Beautiful Mind" (2001), "Sweet Home Alabama" (2002), "Hulk" (2003), "An Unfinished Life" (2005), "Glory Road" (2006), "Poseidon" (2006), "Life as We Know It" (2010), "The Lincoln Lawyer" (2011), "Red Dog" (2011), "J. Edgar" (2011), "The Mend" (2014), "Breakthrough" (2019), "Ford v Ferrari" (2019), and "The Forever Purge" (2021). He has also appeared in television series such as "The Firm" (2012), "The Mysteries of Laura" (2014–2016), and "Yellowstone" (2018–2022).


title: Josh Lucas

text: Lucas was born Joshua Lucas Easy Dent Maurer on June 20, 1971, in Little Rock, Arkansas, the son of Michele (née LeFevre), a nurse midwife, and Don Maurer, an ER doctor.


title: Josh Lucas

text: Lucas grew up traveling the South with his parents, who were antinuclear activists, and his three younger siblings.


title: Josh Lucas

text: By the age of 13, he had lived in 30 different locations, including the Isle of Palms and Sullivan's Island (both in South Carolina). His mother attended Emerson College with Jay Leno. The family eventually settled in Gig Harbor, Washington. He attended Kopachuck Middle School and graduated from Gig Harbor High School in 1989, where he acted in high school plays.


title: Josh Lucas

text: Lucas began his career when he was 19, having moved to Hollywood after his high school graduation. He appeared as a guest star on several TV sitcoms in his early 20s, including Fox's "True Colors" and "Parker Lewis Can't Lose," the family drama "Life Goes On," and CBS's private-eye show "Jake and the Fatman".


title: Josh Lucas

text: Other projects included the horror-thriller "Child of Darkness, Child of Light", an adaptation of James Patterson's novel "Virgin", a tale of two Catholic schoolgirls who find themselves pregnant under mysterious and supernatural circumstances. Lucas followed this appearance by working with executive producer Steven Spielberg and then-unknown actor Clive Owen in the TV-movie "Class of '61", which follows the stories of a group of West Point cadets in 1861 as the Civil War breaks out. Lucas played George Armstrong Custer.


title: Josh Lucas

text: Soon afterward, he made his feature film debut in Frank Marshall's "Alive" about a group of Uruguayan rugby players who, after crashing in the Andes mountains, resort to cannibalism to stay alive. After a brief appearance in the Patrick Swayze comedy "Father Hood", Lucas relocated to Australia to play the hotheaded American cousin Luke McGregor opposite Andrew Clarke and Guy Pearce in the first season of the family western "". Lucas appeared in all 13 episodes of the first season, but claimed in a later interview that despite the friendly environment, he was homesick for the United States, and his character was killed off in the second episode of season 2.


title: Josh Lucas

text: Upon returning to the States, he was still receiving offers as high school/college boyfriends and felt he was not getting the age-appropriate roles he sought. While working with George C. Scott on a TV-movie from the "In the Heat of the Night" series, Scott told him he needed to take acting lessons and develop his talent for both stage and screen. Shortly thereafter, he departed Hollywood and moved to New York City, where he studied privately with various acting coaches.


title: Josh Lucas

text: The second part of his career began with a lead role in the British rowing film "True Blue" (released in the US as "Miracle at Oxford"), in which he played a hotshot Navy rower who was recruited along with three other Americans to help Oxford win its annual boat race with Cambridge. He followed that with relatively small roles in the dramas "Minotaur" and "Harvest". He took his first stab at comedy in "The Definite Maybe", in which he played a recent college graduate who gets fired from his job and schemes with an old friend to purchase a house in the Hamptons.


title: Josh Lucas

text: He appeared as an American businessman in Jule Gilfillan's romantic comedy-drama "Restless". He also appeared in an off-Broadway production of Terrence McNally's controversial "Corpus Christi", a retelling of the Passion, with the Jesus character (named Joshua) and his disciples all being gay. Lucas played the role of Judas as a gay predator. Right before the play was to open, Lucas was mugged and beaten on his way to the theater for dress rehearsal. He played the role of Judas with bloody bandages across his broken nose and black eyes. The audience thought the bandages were part of the play. Following a series of operations to reset his nose, he began gathering larger roles in films like "American Psycho", "The Weight of Water", "Session 9", "The Dancer", "When Strangers Appear", and "You Can Count on Me".


title: Josh Lucas

text: One of Lucas' first feature roles was playing Jace "Flash" Dillon in the cinematic PC flight simulator "".


title: Josh Lucas

text: Lucas gained mainstream exposure after his roles in "Sweet Home Alabama", "A Beautiful Mind", and as Glenn Talbot in "Hulk". He later had leading roles in movies such as "Glory Road", "Poseidon", and "Stealth". In "Glory Road", he starred as basketball coach Don Haskins, a role for which he gained .


title: Josh Lucas

text: His next project was Boaz Yakin’s "Death in Love". "Peacock" is another film in which he starred. Lucas starred in the 2009 Ridley Scott-produced "Tell-Tale", a film based on the short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe.


title: Josh Lucas

text: Earlier that year, Lucas was seen on stage in the off-Broadway run of "Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell". Lucas also completed his second collaboration with documentary film maker Ken Burns, after being involved in Burns’ "The War". Lucas' other documentary work includes "Operational Homecoming", "Trumbo", and the Los Angeles Film Festival Audience Award-winning "Resolved". In February 2010, he was cast in the Anders Anderson thriller "Stolen" the single father of a mentally challenged boy, starring alongside Rhona Mitra and Jon Hamm; the film had a limited theatrical release in March 2010. Lucas also co-stars in the 2010 film "Shadows and Lies" alongside James Franco and Julianne Nicholson.


title: Josh Lucas

text: In 2011, Lucas co-starred with Rachael Taylor in the film "Red Dog", based on the true story of an Australian Kelpie. Lucas won an Inside Film Award for his role. He also starred in the NBC television show "The Firm", which takes place ten years after the John Grisham novel it is based on. The show lasted one season.


title: Josh Lucas

text: In 2013, Lucas was cast as the lead role in the independent comedy-drama, "The Mend". The directorial debut of John Magary premiered at South By Southwest in March 2014 with Lucas receiving a series of positive reviews for his portrayal of Mat, one of two dysfunctional brothers who collide in a small Harlem apartment. From September 2014 to March 2016, Lucas appeared as a main character in the NBC crime drama "The Mysteries of Laura".


title: Josh Lucas

text: In 2018, Lucas was cast in a recurring role in Yellowstone, as a younger version of John Dutton, portrayed by Kevin Costner.


title: Josh Lucas

text: Lucas met freelance writer Jessica Ciencin Henriquez at a dog park in 2011. They became engaged six weeks later and married on March 17, 2012, in Central Park. Their son, Noah Rev Maurer, was born in June 2012. In January 2014, Ciencin Henriquez filed for a divorce that became final in October 2014.


title: Josh Lucas

text: A YouthAIDS Ambassador, Lucas "first joined the YouthAIDS team when he shot the ALDO HIV/AIDS awareness campaign in April, 2005. Soon after, he officially accepted his role as a YouthAIDS Ambassador at the YouthAIDS 2005 Gala, Faces of Africa. HIV/AIDS prevention is particularly important to him as his mother 'has made a career counseling young men and women with the hopes of educating them about the ravaging and often deadly effects of this too common and easily preventable disease.'"


title: Josh Lucas

text: Lucas supported President Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, volunteering to help potential voters register at colleges in Pennsylvania. Lucas knocked on doors and phone banked, wearing an Obama shirt for 45 days. He was also in Denver, Colorado, for the 2008 Democratic National Convention with a group of actors called the Creative Coalition.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: Inside Out is a 2015 American computer-animated film directed by Pete Docter from a screenplay he co-wrote with Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley. Produced by Pixar Animation Studios, it stars the voices of Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Richard Kind, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, Kaitlyn Dias, Diane Lane, and Kyle MacLachlan. The film follows the inner workings inside the mind of a young girl named Riley, as five personified emotions administer her thoughts and actions as she adapts to her family's relocation.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: Docter conceived "Inside Out" in late 2009 after noticing changes in his daughter's personality as she grew older, and it was subsequently green-lighted. Based on the remembrances of Docter and the film's co-writer and co-director Ronnie del Carmen, they adopted an idea involving emotions for the film. During production, the filmmakers consulted psychologists and neuroscientists in order to achieve greater accuracy in their portrayal of the mind. Development on "Inside Out" lasted for five and a half years, on an approximate $175million budget, and the film faced production difficulties, including story changes.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: "Inside Out" debuted out of competition at the 68th Cannes Film Festival on May 18, 2015, and was released in the United States on June 19. The film received positive reviews for its craftsmanship, screenplay, subject matter, plot, and vocal performances (particularly those of Poehler, Smith, Kind, and Black). Organizations like the National Board of Review and the American Film Institute named it as one of the top ten films of 2015. "Inside Out" earned $858.8million worldwide, finishing its theatrical run as the seventh-highest-grossing film of 2015. The film was nominated for two awards at the 88th Academy Awards, winning Best Animated Feature, and received numerous other accolades. A sequel, "Inside Out 2", is scheduled to be released in 2024.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: Within the mind of a young girl named Riley are the basic emotions that control her actions: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger. Her experiences become memories, stored as colored orbs, which are sent into long-term memory each night. The aspects of five most important "core memories" within her personality incorporate the form of five floating islands. Joy acts as the leader, and she and the rest of the emotions try to limit Sadness's influence.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: At the age of 11, Riley moves from Minnesota to San Francisco, California for her father's new job. She at first has poor experiences: the new house is cramped and old, her father hardly has any time for her, a local pizza parlor only serves pizza topped with broccoli she loathed, and the moving van with their belongings was misdirected to Texas. On Riley's first day at her new school, Sadness retroactively turns joyous memories sad, which causes Riley to cry in front of her class and creates a sad core memory. Joy tries to dispose of it by using a vacuum tube, but accidentally knocks the other core memories loose during a struggle with Sadness, disabling the personality islands. Joy, Sadness, and the core memories are sucked out of Headquarters.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: In Joy and Sadness's absence, Anger, Fear, and Disgust are forced to take control of Riley with disastrous results, distancing Riley from her parents, friends, and hobbies. Her disused personality islands gradually crumble, and fall into the "Memory Dump", where things fade to non-existence as they are forgotten. Finally, Anger resolves to return to Minnesota, believing it will restore Riley's happiness.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: While navigating the vast long-term memory area, Joy and Sadness encounter Bing Bong, Riley's childhood imaginary friend, who suggests riding the "train of thought" back to Headquarters. After several adventures and mishaps, the trio eventually catch the train; however, it halts when Riley falls asleep, then derails entirely with the collapse of another island. Afraid that all the core memories will become sad, Joy abandons Sadness and tries to ride a "recall tube" back to the Headquarters. The ground below the tube collapses, breaking it and sending Joy and Bing Bong plunging into the Memory Dump.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: After discovering a sad memory that turned happy when Riley's parents and friends comforted her, Joy understands Sadness's purpose: alerting others when Riley is emotionally overwhelmed and needs help. Joy and Bing Bong try to use Bing Bong's chant-fueled wagon rocket to escape the Memory Dump. They fail to fully ascend, due to their combined weight, until Bing Bong jumps out at the last moment and disintegrates.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: Joy reunites with Sadness and they return to Headquarters, discovering that Anger's idea has disabled the console, rendering Riley apathetic as she boards a bus to Minnesota. To the surprise of the others, Joy hands control of the console to Sadness, who is able to reactivate it and prompt Riley to return to her new home. As Sadness re-installs the core memories, transforming them from happy to sad, Riley tearfully confesses to her parents that she misses her old life. Her parents comfort her and admit they also miss Minnesota. Joy and Sadness work the console together, creating a new core memory consisting of happiness and sadness; a new island forms, representing Riley's acceptance of her new life in San Francisco.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: A year later, Riley, now at the age of 12, has adapted to her new home, made new friends, and returned to her old hobbies while acquiring a few new ones. Inside Headquarters, her emotions admire Riley's new personality islands, and are given a newly expanded console with room for them all to work together. In a mid-credits scene, the audience is given a glimpse into the "headquarters" of various people throughout the city.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: The main theme of "Inside Out" are the consequences and portrayal of emotions and memories. Those depicted in the film are "honest" and "generous"; their goal is maintaining Riley's life. Natasha Moore of the Australian ABC News detailed the film's theme: "[If] Riley's carefree life gets more complicated, [...] Joy's attempts to deliver uninterrupted happiness become increasingly neurotic." Nicole Markotic argued that the film explores the relationship between "the many and the one", demonstrating that people have "composite" personalities. The different components of one person's personality are vital for that person's "emotional and psychological balance". Depression and sadness are distinct in the film, and this distinction is meant to "[offer] individuals strategies to avoid suppressing crucial feelings". Writing in the British Journal of Psychiatry, Hannah Marcarian and Paul O. Wilkinson agree that this validation of different emotions helps people express themselves.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: Ruth Bettelheim of "USA Today" wrote that human responses to physical and social environments evolved over millions of years, and have not yet been fully understood, as shown by the film not including Riley's bodily sensation and their possible effect on mental states. Primatologist Louise Barrett thought the film showed disconnection between characters who are not relating to each other, or to their own emotions; but moments of personal harmony lead to positive interpersonal connections. According to "USA Today"s Jamie Altman, the film shows that major environmental changes can be "difficult, but not impossible, to overcome", recommending it to college students experiencing homesickness or sadness.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: The development of "Inside Out" began in late 2009, when director Pete Docter felt anxiety about his adolescent daughter Elie's progressing introversion. Docter approached Ronnie del Carmen to become a co-director, and he eventually accepted the offer, citing his "accidental" animation work. They relived their past experiences and histories to adopt an idea involving emotions for the film, aiming to depict them with strong, caricatured personalities. Docter had decided to make it after del Carmen determined most of the film's aspects had narrow appeal.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: The directors and producer Jonas Rivera researched the mind with the help of psychologist Paul Ekman and the University of California, Berkeley professor of psychology Dacher Keltner. Pixar animator Dan Holland and his team allowed some psychologists and specialists to accurately develop the film's story. Production designer Ralph Eggleston authorized neuroscientists to design the locations in Riley's mind using DNA-based cues and photographs of neuronal flashes. In Keltner and Ekman's opinion, they emphasized the emotions' formation of social lives and interactions, which can moderate themselves.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: While Keltner focused on Sadness that strengthens relationships, Ekman identified seven emotions with "universal signals" early: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, joy, contempt, and surprise. Therefore, Docter removed surprise from "Inside Out" after he corroborated that it and fear were similar; contempt was abandoned also by the filmmakers. Two of Joy's initial names, happiness and an unrelated optimism, were combined with Joy. A total of 26 emotions, including irritation, envy, greed, gloom, despair, depression, love, schadenfreude, ennui, shame, embarrassment, and hope, were considered for the film before reducing to their possible value. Its finalized, streamlined scope featured a condensed story and the emotions' traits.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: "Inside Out" was green-lit in October 2009, after Docter was interested in forming the main character's story arc. Chief creative officer John Lasseter offered little input on the film due to his focus on restructuring Walt Disney Animation Studios, and it was the first for Pixar without involvement of co-founder and former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who died in 2011. Executives at Disney and Pixar were positive at Docter's proposal, but acknowledged it was difficult to advertise. The film spent five and a half years in development, with an approximate $175million budget. Docter and Eggleston described this an intricate and lengthy process. As such, first-time directors were likely ineligible to work on the film.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: In 2010, Docter and the filmmaking team met to discuss aspects about "Inside Out", including its setting, rules, and reels. Docter then recruited a small story team to develop the film's plotline and design its characters within 12 months; their main challenge was to deal with its multilayered technique. Though the film's script was deemed ambitious and ingenious, screenwriter Michael Arndt spent a year on it before leaving the project in early 2011; he was attributed with additional story material.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: To promote diverse input, half of the story team were women, at a time when the animation industry consisted largely of men. Although "Inside Out" focus was about a girl, research found that females age 11 to 17 were more attuned to expressions and emotions than younger girls. Docter decided that Riley was not a main character, but her role as a setting. He considered the lead emotion as female, since Riley had the same gender. Other emotions were assigned between male and female. Del Carmen influenced the film's story development based around his upbringing, and preferred the idea of hockey's popularity in Minnesota, becoming a core concept. Docter also discarded an initial idea about Riley falling into a deep depression. Creation of storyboards for "Inside Out" took two to three years, and included seven to eight screenings for Pixar's "brain trust" (a small group of creative leaders who oversee its development on all films).


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: The filmmakers were responsible for expressing the characters' personal traits, talents, and contrasts. "Inside Out" design team researched more of her personality's distinct directions, after Docter was concerned over Joy's displeasure. Designer Albert Lozano wanted Joy with tomboyish and "mischievous" characteristics. Amy Poehler helped the team to write Joy, illustrating a broad range of happiness after facing difficulties. With LeFauve's help, the team envisioned Joy as vulnerable and intangible because she was "unapologetically positive". From the outset, the idea persisted about Joy's potential to excessively manipulate youth, setting off Riley's "social storms".


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: In one instance, Riley was to have wanted the lead role as a turkey in a Thanksgiving Day pageant. Ultimately, Docter found that plot idea to be too unfamiliar, and sought something to replace it. Several drafts emerged, including: the characters cultivating ideas after falling to "Idea Fields"; and Bing Bong recruiting at a large, exiled entourage from Riley's childhood. Richard Kind later defined his character as "the fading of childhood" when "Inside Out" development had progressed. In October 2011, Diane Disney Miller convinced Docter to reduce "Inside Out" distractions and reprioritize the story. Docter determined that the concept of personality islands could integrate the mind world's geography and story.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: In 2012, the film was put into production after several screenings and suggestions, and evaluated after three months. Editor Kevin Nolting said that seven versions of the film were created before the production began. The difficult part was to balance the film's tone, for example, how viewers would respond to Joy's cheerful nature while feeling negative about the mess that Joy manipulated in Riley. Rivera credited Poehler for fleshing out these aspects of Joy's nature. Eggleston recommended that the film be set to take place in the mind rather than in the brain, as such a few scenes about the brain were dropped.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: An early version of "Inside Out" focused on Joy and Fear getting lost together. In July 2012, Pixar filmmakers held an evaluation screening of the film. Docter came to find that storyline nonfunctional, and was reluctant to be fired. In 2013, Docter was still unsure about what Joy had learned from Fear to develop her characterization, eventually reached a breakthrough to integrate emotions and relationships within the film. Storyboarding was reworked to replace Fear with Sadness and give Sadness a "much juicier" role. Docter's altercation between Joy and Sadness lacked the film's emotional ending. To address the issue, he changed a scene where Riley separating her friend in its subsequent portions. Islands of Friendship and Personality became Joy and Sadness's outings in the film to maintain its continuity.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: Over the course of storyboarding, 27 sequences and 178,128 outlines were developed, with 127,781 remaining upon completion. According to Cooley, 10 plot rewrites of "Inside Out" and 10 unabridged scenes of Riley’s mind were made. Initial storyboarding differentiated the importance of Riley's story arc than emotions, but Rivera considered the film's balance was "about 75 percent inside, 25 percent out". In early 2013, the filmmakers made seven to eight distinct openings for the film. The brain trust eventually locked the picture and its story. After Cooley and Meg LeFauve contributed the film's rewrite, they were credited as screenwriters. Docter, Cooley, and LeFauve worked on experiences with raising their own children into the screenplay. Cooley highlighted these as emotions and subsequently created them. Production of the film concluded in May 2015, after three years.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: Voice recording began in 2013 and ended in 2014. As "Inside Out" contained several veterans of "Saturday Night Live" ("SNL"), the film's team spent a week at that program for research on a live television sequence. Poehler and Phyllis Smith had three voice recording sessions. Sadness's appearance was inspired by Smith. Once Smith got a call for traveling to Pixar's headquarters in Emeryville, California, Rivera chose her after watching a lunch scene in "Bad Teacher" (2011). He contacted Docter and remarked, "I think we found our Sadness." Poehler was hired as the last of the emotions' cast.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: Fear was inspired by Don Knotts. According to Lozano, Knotts had wide eyes. Docter said, "[He] was the kind of guy who could bring sophistication and then flip on a dime". Bill Hader was cast as Fear after he and the filmmakers visited the set of "SNL" in New York City for a week, and also assisted at the story room. His casting was assumed until his stay ended, but he asked to contact fellow "SNL" veteran Poehler that it was secret. Hader later reaffirmed his involvement in "Inside Out". In all recording sessions, he instructed his screaming voice for his role of Fear.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: When the story was pitched by Mindy Kaling, she said that it sounded "really beautiful" and joined the cast. Disgust was described as akin to the looks of April Ludgate and Veruca Salt. Docter exemplified Lewis Black for Anger, and was perfect for the role after the filmmakers kept him in mind as expected, having realized Black's voice. Kind was cast to voice Bing Bong, who tried to convey the same "sort of innocence" of his previous Pixar roles, and wound up not taking part in pre-release promotion as the producers decided to keep the character a secret.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: Animation of "Inside Out" took a year and a half. About 48 animators (including supervisors Shawn Krause and Victor Navone, and director Jamie Roe), and 350 artists (35 of them lighting–led by cinematographer Kim White–and 10 layout) and technicians were involved in the production of the film. Two other animation teams were also produced: one was separate for abstract sequence and another was crowded for the character process.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: Docter imagined that with emotions for characters, they could "push the level of caricature" to both design and "style of movement" to degrees. To this end, they emulated the styles of animators Tex Avery and Chuck Jones. Docter informed Krause and Navone to push the graphic caricature of each character rather than sticking to the rigid behavior of each RenderMan model. This required an artist to draw over characters in "Inside Out" during dailies, using a Wacom Cintiq. The team spent over three years on enhancing the dinnertime scene, the first one to do so. Sketches resembled the emotions were superior by the filmmakers, despite the rules broke within such boundaries. After the characters were brought to finalized forms, they were proposed for 3D models using desktop computers. The filmmakers studyed dailies and understand animation until Docter gave the film's finalized shots for their approval on lighting and rendering.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: Through the simulation department, the motion of the characters' hair and their garments were added. Eggleston's production design arrived, moving forward for added placements that included their original inspiration for lighting Joy. Pixar co-founder Edwin Catmull believed the characters' attributes have a lesser extent of humanoid forms, brighter colors, and strange shapes due to their possession of force fields. Rendering took 33 hours. All aspects of "Inside Out" were eventually merged to a single image, having an animation spread across 1,600 shots. The film took three weeks of animation to create three seconds of footage.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: Eggleston's diagram was made of pastels shaped Joy, having her increased illumination and making her Pixar's crucial character. Instead of being solid, Joy's effervescence was derived from pinwheels, Champagne, and sparklers. Lozano thought that Joy would look like Audrey Hepburn. For Joy to become brightened, the RenderMan team turned real light from a geometry, and Docter suggested to design her with "sprite-like and golden" modifications. The filmmakers worked for eight months on Joy's aura, but encountered difficulties related to time and budget. Lasseter requested that it be applied for each emotion instead. Eggleston described this technique, "You could hear the core technical staff just hitting the ground, the budget falling through the roof". Docter and his six-designer team spent approximately 18 months finalizing Joy's look. Overall, the process on making Joy ran for three years.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: Eggleston was tasked with outlining "Inside Out" worlds. Its design faithfully reflected Pixar films "Up" (2009), "Toy Story 3" (2010), and the intended 1950s Broadway musicals, which Navone tightened its aspects and was emphasized by freeform techniques. The mind world's layout and cinematography took inspiration from "Casablanca" (1942). Around 300 different designs of Headquarters were developed. Pixar researched films within the Hollywood's golden age for set constructions. They performed master moving shots in combining them into a single scene, the longest of which were 48 seconds or 1,200 frames. In envisaging how the mind's interior would be depicted, the filmmakers concentrated on the word "electrochemical" and was considered for various options using electricity.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: Director of photography Patrick Lin placed "Inside Out" camera language into the mind and real worlds for determining and differentiating them; they were respectively described as superior and inferior. The real world had problems created through lens distortion and out-of-focus shots. Even so, directorial changes countered the camera's complex usage. Two types of camera lenses (Arri/ZeissUltra Prime and Cooke S4), with distinct camera movements and predetermined paths, were used for both worlds. An inherent mechanical procedure using a dolly, track, crane, and boom was used in the mind one; and biological cameras like zoom, Steadicam, and hand-held in the real one. Lin's crew supervised Riley's story arc as these cameras were applied in the film across three acts: first was Steadicam, followed by two were hand-held.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: The use of scale progressions, which measured the worldbuilding size of the main characters, were made for handling the development of them and Riley and Joy's arcs. Staging was used for "Inside Out" story, while framing for its theme. One of the film's parts was described as earliest and reserved, and had closeups for adults indicated for growing up, especially for Joy and Riley. The cameras were created by their crew have attached sensors and were "rough" and "physical"; these were improved in "Inside Out" after using them in Pixar's short film "The Blue Umbrella" (2013). For projecting "Inside Out" environment, they used humans to surround it for the development and assembly of the film's scenes. Layout supported "Inside Out" virtual scenes, making them blocked and animated.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: Michael Giacchino served as composer for "Inside Out". He began planning in January 2015, before concluding that May. While in the music session, Docter felt its score "bittersweet" and "nostalgic" after he "grew up playing the violin and bass". Giacchino wanted to create something more emotionally monumental for "Inside Out"s score, when compared to his score from "Up". The producers first met with Giacchino to discuss the film's concept and screen it for him. In response, he composed an eight-minute suite of music, unconnected to the film, based on his emotions viewing it. Rivera remarked that as both Giacchino and Docter were musicians, and they discussed the film in terms of story and character. In accordance with its creative preference, a progressive soundscape was made by sound designer Ren Klyce, who was joined by Rivera. Docter took a four-year discussion where his piano sessions considered forgetfulness, and a chewing gum advertising jingle was disturbing.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: Disney spearheaded the marketing campaign. Their strategy entailed aggressive social media engagement, a worldwide publicity tour, and the creation of five colorful character posters. Leading up to its release, "Inside Out" was test screened for children, since executives were concerned about the film's appeal to younger viewers.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: The 95-minute "Inside Out" debuted out of competition at the 68th Cannes Film Festival on May 18, 2015, followed by a premiere on June 16, at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles. "Inside Out" was originally scheduled for general release on May 30, 2014, but it was pushed back to June 19, 2015. The film was also released in 3D, as well as Dolby Vision, one of the earliest films to adopt the format. In theaters, "Inside Out" was accompanied by a short film, "Lava" (2014).


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment released "Inside Out" for digital download on October 13, 2015, and on Blu-ray and DVD on November 3. Physical copies contain behind-the-scenes featurettes, audio commentary, deleted scenes, and two shorts: "Lava" and "Riley's First Date?" (2015). In 2019, "Inside Out" was released on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: "Inside Out" earned $356.9million in the United States and Canada and $501.9million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $858.8million. It was the seventh-highest-grossing film of 2015. "Deadline Hollywood" calculated the film's net profit as $279.51million, accounting for production budgets, marketing, talent participations, and other costs; box office grosses and home media revenues placed it sixth on their list of 2015's "Most Valuable Blockbusters".


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: In the United States and Canada, exit polling showed extensive female attraction across a variety of audiences that made 63 percent, with families at 71 percent, and most of them younger were 59, 46, and 38 percent at ages under 25, 18, and 12, respectively. "Inside Out" was released with "Dope" on June 19, 2015. It earned $34.3million on its first day, including $3.7million from Thursday night previews. The film debuted in second place behind "Jurassic World", earning $90.4million from 3,946 theaters (3,100 in 3D); it was the first for Pixar not to do so at first. For any film that broke a such record during the opening weekend, "Inside Out" surpassed "The Day After Tomorrow" (2004) $68.7million. "Inside Out"s successful opening was attributed to its Cannes premiere, CinemaCon and Fathom Events screenings, its critical reception, good word-of-mouth, and Father's Day weekend. Additionally, it had the highest opening weekend for an original film, surpassing "Avatar" (2009). Its second weekend earnings dropped by 42 percent to $52.1million, and followed by another $29.8million the third weekend. By July 19, the film's domestic earnings topped $300million. "Inside Out" completed its theatrical run in the United States and Canada on December 10, 2015. In July 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic closing most theaters worldwide and limiting what films played, "Inside Out" returned to 442 theaters (mostly drive-ins) and earned $340,000.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: Worldwide, "Inside Out" earned $40.3million in its opening weekend in 37 markets. On its opening weekend elsewhere, the top countries were China ($11.7million), the United Kingdom ($11.5million), Mexico ($8.6million), Russia ($7.6million), Italy ($7.4million), Germany ($7.1million), and South Korea ($5.2million). In Russia, "Inside Out" was the first Pixar film to earn more than one billion rubles. By September 20, 2015, the film's offshore gross had exceeded $408.8million. , its top international markets were the United Kingdom ($59.5million), Japan ($32.9million), South Korea ($32.7million), Germany ($31.6million), and France ($30.1million).


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: "Inside Out" has an approval rating of based on professional reviews on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of . Its critical consensus reads, "Inventive, gorgeously animated, and powerfully moving, "Inside Out" is another outstanding addition to the Pixar library of modern animated classics." Metacritic (which uses a weighted average) assigned "Inside Out" a score of 94 out of 100 based on 55 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale. Before the release of "Inside Out", fans and critics were concerned by a perceived overdependence on sequels on the part of Pixar, which was only exacerbated by the announcement of "Toy Story 4" (2019), and their films declining in quality. Likewise, DreamWorks Animation's competition with Pixar was disappointingly lacking, leading to speculation that computer-animated films were "in a funk".


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: Several journalists praised "Inside Out" for its craftsmanship, which they saw as an exercise of Docter's expertise, as the film was considered a return of Pixar's form by numerous critics. Peter Debruge ("Variety"), Kenneth Turan ("Los Angeles Times"), and Todd McCarthy ("The Hollywood Reporter") praised the film. Debruge and Turan described it as the best, with his and McCarthy's evaluations were meant "sophisticated" and "audacious". Turan and Richard Brody ("The New Yorker") cited the film's engaging visuals, responsibility to emotions, characterization of solutions, and narrow aspects of Riley's imagination; Debruge and Anthony Lane ("The New Yorker") encouraged its originality. "Vulture" David Edelstein suggested them that the film made a "new pop-culture touchstone". Despite these overall reviews, "The Guardian" critic Peter Bradshaw and "Slant Magazine" writer Christopher Gray assessed the film as slightly inferior to Pixar's best.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: The scriptwriting, plot, and subject matter were sources of praise. "Forbes" Scott Mendelson thought that its qualities of narration provided a purpose, whereas Leigh Singer of "IGN" conveyed the film's tropes: child devotion, teamwork, and confused chases. Singer expressed the "tried-and-tested" journey had an unprecedented "licence to go". In contrast, Rene Rodriguez, writing for the "Miami Herald", expressed concern over the film's plot. Rodriguez cited its aspects, including its story skipping from the beginning to the end, and events involving inside Riley's head having thin goals. Ann Hornaday ("The Washington Post") and A. O. Scott ("The New York Times") appreciated its entertaining subject matter, promoting mental health by "The Hindu" Udhav Naig, the body language by ComicBook.com's Chase Magnett, and the human movements by "USA Today" Brian Truitt and "Reason" Kurt Loder. On the other hand, Naig panned the film's misinterpretation of brain functions. Matt Zoller Seitz of "RogerEbert.com" emphasized the film's script that has clear connections to its aspects, including Joy's comprehension should "what things mean, and what the other emotions ought to 'do' for Riley".


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: Reviews for the actors' performances were very positive in the media, with their work described as "wonderful" and "excellent". Edelstein laboriously commended Poehler's acting, indicating that she had "supernatural exuberance but the semi-tonal quavers of doubt that keep that [...] from being cloying or cartoonish." Joy was viewed as a heartful character and Sadness was a superfluous disapproval to the "secret side" by Tim Grierson of "Paste", whereas "Vox" Alex Abad-Santos felt that because of its appealing voice cast. Magnett credited Grierson's examination that reached these roles to their extent with accommodation, and made Anger the "most perfect" one due to his routine having a culmination, having a "sense of humor and genuine care". While Seitz took Sadness to have more value of her contribution, others, such as Jessica Kiang (IndieWire) and Tasha Robinson ("The Dissolve"), cited character development as one of its strengths.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: "Inside Out" was included on a number of best-of lists. It was listed on many critics' top ten lists in 2015, ranking fourth. The film appeared on professional rankings from BBC, "The New York Times", "Empire", and "The Independent" based on retrospective appraisal, as one of the greatest films of the twenty-first century. "Inside Out" appeared on several lists of the best films of the 2010s in 2019, by outlets including: IndieWire, "The A.V. Club", "The Independent", "RogerEbert.com", "/Film", "Time Out London", "GamesRadar+", and the "Los Angeles Times". Several publications have listed it as one of the best animated films, including: "Harper's Bazaar" (2017), "Insider", "USA Today", "Elle" (all 2018), "Rolling Stone" (2019), "Esquire" (2020), "Parade", "Complex", "Time Out New York", and "Empire" (all 2021). In December 2021, the film's screenplay was listed number 29 on the Writers Guild of America's "101 Greatest Screenplays of the 21st Century (So Far)".


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: At the 88th Academy Awards, "Inside Out" received a nomination for Best Original Screenplay and won Best Animated Feature. The film's other nominations include fourteen Annie Awards (winning ten), two British Academy Film Awards (winning one), three Critics' Choice Movie Awards (winning one), and a Golden Globe Award (which it won). It was named one of the ten best films of 2015 by the National Board of Review (where it also won Best Animated Film) and the American Film Institute.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: "Inside Out" sparked various Internet meme reactions, including Joy and Disgust similarizing the Philippine supercouple named AlDub; and the real-world core memories montaging personal moments, which went viral on TikTok. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was one of the 35 films recommended people watch by "The Independent".


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: Three lawsuits followed "Inside Out" release. Pediatrician Denise Daniels sued Disney and Pixar in 2017 for including the film's personified emotions to the television series "The Moodsters". Two similar suits were followed in 2018: author Carla J. Masterson sued Disney for infringing her books "What’s on the Other Side of the Rainbow?" and "The Secret of the Golden Mirror", and another was brought by the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, who said that both films (owned by Canadian student Damon Pourshian, and Disney and Pixar) titled "Inside Out" were equivalent. Pourshian's suit was later green-lit by an Ontario court in 2021. The outcomes of these lawsuits were unknown, while Daniels's one was rejected, resulting the ineligibility of being copyrighted.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: "Disney Infinity 3.0" (2015) includes a platformer-type "Inside Out" playset featuring the emotions as playable characters. A mobile Puzzle Bobble-style game, "Inside Out: Thought Bubbles", was released in 2015 for some app stores. Lasting for three levels, Google started a Made with Code event for the film that December, named "Inside HQ", with fans wishing to start a programming on the tutorial to recreate scenes using Blocky, a mini-game whose snippets used to resolve issues.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: Inside Out Emotional Whirlwind, a spinner ride, ran since 2019 at Disney California Adventure. "Emotions at Play with Pixar's Inside Out" is an exhibit at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh, that has been in operation since 2021. It features activities based on set pieces from the film. A sweet shop "Inside Out": Joyful Sweets opened on "Disney Wish" in July 2022.


title: Inside Out (2015 film)

text: "Inside Out" will be followed by "Inside Out 2" (2024). It will follow a teenage Riley with a "new set of personified emotions".


title: Ubisoft

text: Ubisoft Entertainment SA (; ; formerly Ubi Soft Entertainment SA) is a French video game publisher headquartered in Saint-Mandé with development studios across the world. Its video game franchises include "Assassin's Creed", "Far Cry", "For Honor", "Just Dance", "Prince of Persia", "Rabbids", "Rayman", "Tom Clancy's", and "Watch Dogs".


title: Ubisoft

text: By the 1980s, the Guillemot family had established themselves as a support business for farmers in the Brittany province of France and other regions, including into the United Kingdom. The five sons of the family – Christian, Claude, Gérard, Michel, and Yves – helped with the company's sales, distribution, accounting, and management with their parents before university. All 5 gained business experience while at university, which they brought back to the family business after graduating. The brothers came up with the idea of diversification to sell other products of use to farmers; Claude began with selling CD audio media. Later, the brothers expanded to computers and additional software that included video games. In the 1980s, they saw that the costs of buying computers and software from a French supplier was more expensive than buying the same materials in the United Kingdom and shipping to France, and came upon the idea of a mail-order business around computers and software. Their mother said they could start their own business this way as long as they managed it themselves and equally split its shares among the 5 of them. Their first business was Guillemot Informatique, founded in 1984. They originally only sold through mail order, and then were getting orders from French retailers, since they were able to undercut other suppliers by up to 50% of the cost of some titles. By 1986, this company was earning about 40 million French francs (roughly at that time). In 1985, the brothers established Guillemot Corporation for similar distribution of computer hardware. As demand continued, the brothers recognised that video game software was becoming a lucrative property and decided that they needed to get into the industry's development side, already having insight on the publication and distribution side. Ubi Soft (formally named Ubi Soft Entertainment S.A.) was founded by the brothers on 28 March 1986. The name "Ubi Soft" was selected to represent "ubiquitous" software.


title: Ubisoft

text: Ubi Soft initially operated out of offices in Paris, moving to Créteil by June 1986. The brothers used the chateau in Brittany as the primary space for development, hoping the setting would lure developers, as well as to have a better way to manage expectations of their developers. The company hired Nathalie Saloud as manager, Sylvie Hugonnier as director of marketing and public relations, and programmers, though Hugonnier had left the company by May 1986 to join Elite Software. Games published by Ubi Soft in 1986 include "Zombi", "Ciné Clap", "Fer et Flamme", "Masque", and Graphic City, a sprite editing programme. As their first game, "Zombi" had sold 5,000 copies by January 1987. Ubi Soft also entered into distribution partnerships for the game to be released in Spain and West Germany. Ubi Soft started importing products from abroad for distribution in France, with 1987 releases including Elite Software's "Commando" and "Ikari Warriors", the former of which sold 15,000 copies by January 1987. In 1988, Yves Guillemot was appointed as Ubi Soft's chief executive officer.


title: Ubisoft

text: By 1988, the company had about 6 developers working from the chateau. These included Michel Ancel, a teenager at the time noted for his animation skills, and Serge Hascoët, who applied to be a video game tester for the company. The costs of maintaining the chateau became more expensive, and the developers were given the option to relocate to Paris. Ancel's family which had moved to Brittany for his job could not afford the cost of living in Paris and returned to Montpellier in southern France. The Guillemot brothers told Ancel to keep them abreast of anything he might come up with there. Ancel returned with Frédéric Houde with a prototype of a game with animated features that caught the brothers' interest. Michel Guillemot decided to make the project a key one for the company, establishing a studio in Montreuil to house over 100 developers in 1994, and targeting a line of 5th generation consoles such as the Atari Jaguar and PlayStation. Their game, "Rayman", was released in 1995. Yves managed Guillemot Informatique, making deals with Electronic Arts, Sierra On-Line and MicroProse to distribute their games in France. Guillemot Informatique began expanding to other markets, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. They entered the video game distribution and wholesale markets and by 1993 had become the "largest" distributor of video games in France.


title: Ubisoft

text: In 1996, Ubi Soft listed its initial public offering and raised over in funds to help them to expand the company. Within 2 years, the company established worldwide studios in Annecy (1996), Shanghai (1996), Montreal (1997), and Milan (1998).


title: Ubisoft

text: A difficulty that the brothers found was the lack of an intellectual property that would have a foothold in the United States market. When "widespread growth" of the Internet arrived around 1999, the brothers decided to take advantage of this by founding game studios aimed at online free-to-play titles, including GameLoft; this allowed them to license the rights to Ubi Soft properties to these companies, increasing the share value of Ubi Soft five-fold. With the extra infusion of , they were able to then purchase Red Storm Entertainment in 2000, giving them access to the "Tom Clancy's" series of stealth and spy games. Ubi Soft helped with Red Storm to continue to expand the series, bringing titles like "Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon" and "Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six" series. The company got a foothold in the United States when it worked with Microsoft to develop "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell", an Xbox-exclusive title released in 2002 to challenge the PlayStation-exclusive "Metal Gear Solid" series, by combining elements of "Tom Clancy's" series with elements of an in-house developed game called "The Drift".


title: Ubisoft

text: In March 2001, Gores Technology Group sold The Learning Company's entertainment division (which included games originally published by Brøderbund, Mattel Interactive, Mindscape and Strategic Simulations) to them. The sale included the rights to intellectual properties such as the "Myst" and "Prince of Persia" series. Ubisoft Montreal developed the "Prince of Persia" title into "" released in 2003. At the same time, Ubi Soft released "Beyond Good & Evil", Ancel's project after "Rayman"; it was one of Ubi Soft's first commercial "flop" at its release alongside a 2003 release market and which since has gained a cult following.


title: Ubisoft

text: Around 2001, Ubi Soft established its editorial department headed by Hascoët, initially named as editor in chief and later known as the company's Chief Content Officer. Hascoët had worked alongside Ancel on "Rayman" in 1995 to help refine the game, and saw the opportunity to apply that across all of Ubi Soft's games. Until 2019, most games published by Ubisoft was reviewed through the editorial department and personally by Hascoët.


title: Ubisoft

text: On 9 September 2003, Ubi Soft announced that it would change its name to Ubisoft, and introduced a new logo known as "the swirl". In December 2004, gaming corporation Electronic Arts purchased a 19.9% stake in the firm. Ubisoft referred to the purchase as "hostile" on EA's part. Ubisoft's brothers recognised they had not considered themselves within a competitive market, and employees had feared that an EA takeover would drastically alter the environment within Ubisoft. EA's CEO at the time, John Riccitiello, assured Ubisoft the purchase was not meant as a hostile manoeuvre, and EA ended up selling the shares in 2010.


title: Ubisoft

text: In February 2005, Ubisoft acquired the "NHL Rivals", "NFL Fever", "NBA Inside Drive" and "MLB Inside Pitch" franchises from Microsoft Game Studios.


title: Ubisoft

text: Ubisoft established another IP, "Assassin's Creed", first launched in 2007; "Assassin's Creed" was originally developed by Ubisoft Montreal as a sequel to "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time" and instead transitioned to a story about Assassins and the Templar Knights. In July 2006, Ubisoft bought the "Driver" franchise from Atari for a sum of €19 million in cash for the franchise, technology rights, and most assets. Within 2008, Ubisoft made a deal with Tom Clancy for perpetual use of his name and intellectual property for video games and other auxiliary media. In July 2008, Ubisoft made the acquisition of Hybride Technologies, a Piedmont-based studio. In November 2008, Ubisoft acquired Massive Entertainment from Activision. In January 2013, Ubisoft acquired "" from THQ for $3.265 million.


title: Ubisoft

text: Ubisoft announced plans in 2013 to invest $373 million into its Quebec operations over 7 years. The publisher is investing in the expansion of its motion capture technologies and consolidating its online games operations and infrastructure in Montreal. By 2020, the company would employ more than 3,500 staff at its studios in Montreal and Quebec City.


title: Ubisoft

text: In July 2013, Ubisoft announced a breach in its network resulting in the potential exposure of up to 58 million accounts including usernames, email address, and encrypted passwords. The firm denied any credit/debit card information could have been compromised, issued directives to all registered users to change their account passwords, and recommended updating passwords on any other website or service where a same or similar password had been used. All the users who registered were emailed by the Ubisoft company about the breach and a password change request. Ubisoft promised to keep the information safe.


title: Ubisoft

text: In March 2015, the company set up a Consumer Relationship Centre in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The centre is intended to integrate consumer support teams and community managers. Consumer Support and Community Management teams at the CRC are operational 7 days a week.


title: Ubisoft

text: Since around 2015, the French mass media company Vivendi has been seeking to expand its media properties through acquisitions and other business deals. In addition to advertising firm Havas, Ubisoft was one of the first target properties identified by Vivendi, which as of September 2017 has an estimated valuation of $6.4 billion. Vivendi, in two actions during October 2015, bought shares in Ubisoft stock, giving them a 10.4% stake in Ubisoft, an action that Yves Guillemot considered "unwelcome" and feared a hostile takeover. In a presentation during the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2016, Yves Guillemot stressed the importance that Ubisoft remain an independent company to maintain its creative freedom. Guillemot later described the need to fight off the takeover: "...when you're attacked with a company that has a different philosophy, you know it can affect what you've been creating from scratch. So you fight with a lot of energy to make sure it can't be destroyed." Vice-President of Live Operations, Anne Blondel-Jouin, expressed similar sentiment in an interview with "PCGamesN", stating that Ubisoft's success was partly due to "...being super independent, being very autonomous."


title: Ubisoft

text: Vivendi acquired stake in mobile game publisher Gameloft, owned by the Guillemots, and started acquiring Ubisoft shares. In the following February, Vivendi acquired €500 million worth of shares in Gameloft, gaining more than 30% of the shares and requiring the company under French law to make a public tender offer; this action enabled Vivendi to complete the takeover of Gameloft by June 2016. Following Vivendi's actions with Gameloft in February 2016, the Guillemots asked for more Canadian investors in the following February to fend off a similar Vivendi takeover; by this point, Vivendi had increased their share in Ubisoft to 15%, exceeding the estimated 9% that the Guillemots owned. By June 2016, Vivendi had increased its shares to 20.1% and denied it was in the process of a takeover.


title: Ubisoft

text: By the time of Ubisoft's annual board meeting in September 2016, Vivendi had gained 23% of the shares, while the Guillemots were able to increase their voting share to 20%. A request was made at the board meeting to place Vivendi representatives on Ubisoft's board, given the size of their shareholdings. The Guillemots argued against this, reiterating that Vivendi should be seen as a competitor, and succeeded in swaying other voting members to deny any board seats to Vivendi.


title: Ubisoft

text: Vivendi continued to buy shares in Ubisoft, approaching the 30% mark that could trigger a takeover; as of December 2016, Vivendi held a 25.15% stake in Ubisoft. "Reuters" reported in April 2017 that Vivendi's takeover of Ubisoft would likely happen that year and "Bloomberg Businessweek" observed that some of Vivendi's shares would reach the 2-year holding mark, which would grant them double voting power, and would likely meet or exceed the 30% threshold. The Guillemot family has since raised its stake in Ubisoft; as of June 2017, the family held 13.6% of Ubisoft's share capital, and 20.02% of the company's voting rights. In October 2017, Ubisoft announced it reached a deal with an "investment services provider" to help them purchase back 4 million shares by the end of the year, preventing others, specifically Vivendi, from buying these.


title: Ubisoft

text: In the week before Vivendi would gain double-voting rights for previously purchased shares, the company, in quarterly results published in November 2017, announced that it had no plans to acquire Ubisoft for the next 6 months, nor would seek board positions due to the shares they held during that time, and that it "would ensure that its interest in Ubisoft would not exceed the threshold of 30% through the doubling of its voting rights." Vivendi remained committed to expanding in the video game sector, identifying that their investment in Ubisoft could represent a capital gain of over 1 billion euros.


title: Ubisoft

text: On 20 March 2018, Ubisoft and Vivendi struck a deal ending any potential takeover, with Vivendi agreeing to sell all of its shares, over 30 million, to other parties and agreeing to not buy any Ubisoft shares for 5 years. Some of those shares were sold to Tencent, which after the transaction held about 5.6 million shares of Ubisoft (approximately 5% of all shares). The same day, Ubisoft announced a partnership with Tencent to help bring their games into the Chinese market. Vivendi completely divested its shares in Ubisoft by March 2019.


title: Ubisoft

text: Since 2018, Ubisoft's studios have continued to focus on some franchises, including "Assassin's Creed", "Tom Clancy's", "Far Cry", and "Watch Dogs". As reported by "Bloomberg Businessweek", while Ubisoft as a whole had nearly 16,000 developers by mid-2019, larger than some of its competitors, and producing 5 to 6 major AAA releases each year compared to the 2 or 3 from the others, the net revenue earned per employee was the lowest of the 4 due to generally lower sales of its games. "Bloomberg Business" attributed this partially due to spending trends by video game consumers purchasing fewer games with long playtimes, as most of Ubisoft's major releases tend to be. To counter this, Ubisoft in October 2019 postponed 3 of the 6 titles it had planned in 2019 to 2020 or later, as to help place more effort on improving the quality of the existing and released games. Due to overall weak sales in 2019, Ubisoft stated in January 2020 that it would be reorganizing its editorial board to provide a more comprehensive look at its game portfolio and devise greater variation in its games which Ubisoft's management said had fallen stagnant, too uniform and had contributed to weak sales.


title: Ubisoft

text: Stemming from a wave of sexual misconduct accusations of the #MeToo movement in June and July 2020, Ubisoft had a number of employees accused of misconduct from both internal and external sources. Between Ubisoft's internal investigation and a study by the newspaper "Libération", employees had been found to have records of sexual misconduct and troubling behaviour, going back up to 10 years, which had been dismissed by the human resources departments. As a result, some Ubisoft staff either quit or were fired, including Hascoët, Maxime Béland, the co-founder of Ubisoft Toronto, and Yannis Mallat, the managing director of Ubisoft's Canadian studios. Yves Guillemot implemented changes in the company to address these issues as it further investigated the extent of the misconduct claims.


title: Ubisoft

text: In 2020, they announced that they would be making an open world "Star Wars" game. The deal marked an end to EA's exclusive rights to make "Star Wars" titles.


title: Ubisoft

text: Ubisoft stated in its end of 2020 fiscal year investor call in February 2021 that the company will start to make AAA game releases less of a focus and put more focus on mobile and freemium games following fiscal year 2022. CFO Frederick Duguet stated to investors that "we see that we are progressively, continuously moving from a model that used to be only focused on AAA releases to a model where we have a combination of strong releases from AAA and strong back catalog dynamics, but also complimenting our program of new releases with free-to-play and other premium experiences." Later that year, the company announced it would start branding games developed by its 1st-party developers as "Ubisoft Originals".


title: Ubisoft

text: After earlier stating their intent to explore blockchain games, Ubisoft announced its Ubisoft Quartz blockchain program in December 2021, allowing players to buy uniquely identified customization items for games and then sell and trade them based on the Tezos currency, which Ubisoft claimed was an energy efficient cryptocurrency. This marked the first "AAA" effort into blockchain games.


title: Ubisoft

text: Tencent invested another into Guillemot Brothers Limited, the company that holds part of the Guillemots' ownership of Ubisoft, in September 2022. This gave Tencent 49.9% ownership in this holding company and increased the Guillemots' share of voting rights within Ubisoft to about 30%. Yves Guillemot said that Tencent would be working closely with Ubisoft, helping to bring their games into China while assisting in paying off Ubisoft's debts and preventing the company from potential buyouts.


title: Ubisoft

text: Ubisoft Connect, formerly Uplay, is a digital distribution, digital rights management, multiplayer and communications service for PC created by Ubisoft. First launched alongside "Assassin's Creed II" as a rewards program to earn points towards in-game content for completing achievements within Ubisoft, it expanded into a desktop client and storefront for Windows machine alongside other features. Ubisoft later separated the rewards program out as its Ubisoft Club program, integrated with Uplay. Ubisoft Connect was announced in October 2020 as a replacement for UPlay and its Ubisoft Club to launch on October 29, 2020 alongside "Watch Dogs: Legion". Connect replaces UPlay and the Club's previous functions while adding support for cross-platform play and save progression for some games. It includes the same reward progression system that the Club offered to gain access to in-game content. Some games on the UPlay service will not be updated to support these reward features that they previously had under the Ubisoft Club; for those, Ubisoft will unlock all rewards for all players.


title: Ubisoft

text: Uplay/Ubisoft Connect serves to manage the digital rights for Ubisoft's games on Windows computers, which has led to criticism when it was first launched, as some games required always-on digital rights management, causing loss of save game data should players lose their Internet connection. The situation was aggravated after Ubisoft's servers were struck with denial of service attacks that made the Ubisoft games unplayable due to this DRM scheme. Ubisoft eventually abandoned the always-on DRM scheme and still require all Ubisoft games to perform a start-up check through Uplay/Ubisoft Connect their servers when launched.


title: Ubisoft

text: Ubisoft Anvil, formerly named Scimitar, is a proprietary game engine developed wholly within Ubisoft Montreal in 2007 for the development of the first "Assassin's Creed" game and has since been expanded and used for most "Assassin's Creed" titles and other Ubisoft games, including Ghost Recon Wildlands, Ghost Recon Breakpoint and For Honor.


title: Ubisoft

text: The Disrupt game engine was developed by Ubisoft Montreal and is used for the "Watch Dogs" games. The majority of the engine was built from scratch and uses a multithreaded renderer, running on fully deferred physically based rendering pipeline with some technological twists to allow for more advanced effects. Developer Ubisoft Montreal spent four years creating the engine. Parts of the engine was originally intended for another game in the "Driver" franchise.


title: Ubisoft

text: The Dunia Engine is a software fork of the CryEngine that was originally developed by Crytek, with modifications made by Ubisoft Montreal. The CryEngine at the time could render some outdoor environmental spaces. Crytek had created a demo of its engine called "X-Isle: Dinosaur Island" which it had demonstrated at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 1999. Ubisoft saw the demo and had Crytek build out the demo into a full title, becoming the first "Far Cry", released in 2004. That year, Electronic Arts established a deal with Crytek to build a wholly different title with an improved version of the CryEngine, leaving them unable to continue work on "Far Cry". Ubisoft assigned Ubisoft Montreal to develop console versions of "Far Cry", and arranging with Crytek to have all rights to the "Far Cry" series and a perpetual licence on the CryEngine.


title: Ubisoft

text: In developing "Far Cry 2", Ubisoft Montreal modified the CryEngine to include destructible environments and a more realistic physics engine. This modified version became the Dunia Engine which premiered with "Far Cry 2" in 2008. The Dunia Engine continued to be improved, such as adding weather systems, and used as the basis of all future "Far Cry" games, and "", developed by Ubisoft Montreal.


title: Ubisoft

text: Ubisoft introduced the Dunia 2 engine first in "Far Cry 3" in 2012, which was made to improve the performance of Dunia-based games on consoles and to add more complex rendering features such as global illumination. According to Remi Quenin, one of the engine's architects at Ubisoft Montreal, the state of the Dunia Engine as of 2017 includes "vegetation, fire simulation, destruction, vehicles, systemic AI, wildlife, weather, day/night cycles, [and] non linear storytelling" which are elements of the "Far Cry" games. For "Far Cry 6", Ubisoft introduced more features to the Dunia 2 engine such as ray tracing support on the PC version and support for AMD's open source variable resolution technology, FidelityFX.


title: Ubisoft

text: The Snowdrop game engine was co-developed by Massive Entertainment and Ubisoft for "Tom Clancy's The Division". The core of the game engine is powered by a "node-based system" which simplifies the process of connecting different systems like rendering, AI, mission scripting and the user interface. The engine was used in "Tom Clancy's The Division 2" and other Ubisoft games such as "", "", and "". The engine is next-gen ready and will be used in Massive's "" and a "Star Wars" open-world game.


title: Ubisoft

text: According to Guillemot, Ubisoft recognised that connected sandbox games, with seamless switches between single and multiplayer modes provided the players with more fun, leading the company to switch from pursuing single-player only games to internet connected ones. According to Guillemot, Ubisoft internally refers to its reimagined self as 'before "The Division" and an 'after "The Division".


title: Ubisoft

text: In an interview with "The Verge", Anne Blondel-Jouin, executive producer of "The Crew" turned vice-president of live operations, noted that "The Crew" was an early game of Ubisoft's to require a persistent internet connection in order to play. This raised concerns for gamers and internally at the company.


title: Ubisoft

text: Ubisoft initiated its Ubisoft Film & Television division then named Ubisoft Motion Pictures in 2011. Initially developing media works tied to Ubisoft's games, it has since diversified to other works including about video games. Productions include the live-action film "Assassin's Creed" (2016) and the series "Rabbids Invasion" (2013), and "Mythic Quest" (2020–present).


title: Ubisoft

text: From June to July 2020, a wave of sexual misconduct accusations occurred through the video game industry as part of the ongoing #MeToo Movement, including some of Ubisoft's employees. Ashraf Ismail, the creative director of "", stepped down to deal with personal issues related to allegations made towards him; he was later terminated by Ubisoft in August 2020 after their internal investigations. Ubisoft announced two executives that were also accused of misconduct had been placed on leave, and that they were performing an internal review of other accusations and their own policies. Yves Guillemot stated on 2 July 2020 that he had appointed Lidwine Sauer as their head of workplace culture who is "empowered to examine all aspects of our company's culture and to suggest comprehensive changes that will benefit all of us", in addition to other internal and external programs to deal with ongoing issues that may have contributed to these problems. Specific accusations were made at Ubisoft Toronto where the studio co-founder Maxime Béland, also the vice president of editorial for Ubisoft as a whole, was forced to resign by Ubisoft's management due to sexual misconduct issues and led some employees working there to express strong concerns that "The way the studio—HR and management—disregards complaints just enables this behavior from men." Tommy François, the vice president of editorial and creative services, had been placed on disciplinary leave around July and by August, Ubisoft announced his departure from the company.


title: Ubisoft

text: Spurred by these claims, the newspaper "Libération" had begun a deeper investigation into the workplace culture at Ubisoft. The paper ran a 2-part report printed on 1 and 10 July 2020 that claimed that Ubisoft had a toxic workplace culture. A component of that workplace was from accusations related to Hascoët. The issues identified by "Libération" and corroborated by employees from other studios suggested that some of these problems had extended from the human resource heads of the company ignoring complaints made against Hascoët, using sexual misconduct and harassment to intimidate those who criticized him, on the basis that the creative leads were producing valuable products for the company. On 11 July 2020, the company issued a press release, announcing departures which include the voluntary resignations of Hascoët, Yannis Mallat, the managing director of Ubisoft's Canadian studios, and Cécile Cornet, the company's global head of human resources. Yves Guillemot temporarily filled in Hascoët's former role.


title: Ubisoft

text: A following report from "Bloomberg News" by Jason Schreier corroborated these details, with employees of Ubisoft's main Paris headquarters comparing it to a fraternity house. Schreier had found that the issues with Hascoët had gone back years and had affected the creative development on the "Assassin's Creed" series and other products as to avoid the use of female protagonists. Ubisoft had already been criticized for failing to support female player models in "Assassin's Creed Unity" or in "Far Cry 4", which the company claimed was due to difficulty in animating female characters despite having done this in earlier games. Ubisoft employees, in Schreier's report, said that in the following "Assassin's Creed" games which did feature female protagonists at release, including "Assassin's Creed Syndicate" and "Assassin's Creed Origins", there were serious considerations of removing or downplaying the female leads from the editorial department. This was due to a belief that Hascoët had set in the department that female characters did not sell video games. Further, because of Hascoët's clout in the company, the developers would have to make compromises to meet Hascoët's expectations, such as the inclusion of a strong male character if they had included female leads or if they had used cutscenes, a narrative concept Hascoët reportedly did not like. Hascoët's behavior among other content decisions made by Hascoët had "appeared to affect" the quality of Ubisoft's games by 2019; both "Tom Clancy's The Division 2" and "Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint" "underperformed", which gave Ubisoft justification to diminish Hascoët's oversight with the aforementioned January 2020 changes in the editorial department and gave its members more autonomy. There remained questions as to what degree CEO Yves Guillemot knew of these issues prior to their public reporting; employees reported that Hascoët has been very close with the Guillemot brothers since the founding of the editorial department around 2001 and that some of the prior complaints of sexual misconduct had been reported directly to Yves and were dismissed. "Gamasutra" also spoke to some former and current Ubisoft employees during this period from its worldwide studios, corroborating that these issues appears to replicate across multiple studios, stemming from Ubisoft's main management.


title: Ubisoft

text: Ubisoft had a shareholders' meeting on 22 July 2020 addressing these more recent issues. Changes in the wake of the departures included a reorganization of both the editorial team and the human resources team. 2 positions, Head of Workplace Culture and Head of Diversity and Inclusion, would be created to oversee the safety and morale of employees going forward. To encourage this, Ubisoft said it would tie the performance bonus of team leaders to how well they "create a positive and inclusive workplace environment" so that these changes are propagated throughout the company. Ahead of a September 2020 "Ubisoft Forward" media presentation, Yves Guillemot issued a formal apology for the company on their lack of responsibility in the matters prior to these events. Guillemot said "This summer, we learned that certain Ubisoft employees did not uphold our company's values, and that our system failed to protect the victims of their behavior. I am truly sorry to everyone who was hurt. We have taken significant steps to remove or sanction those who violated our values and code of conduct, and we are working hard to improve our systems and processes. We are also focused on improving diversity and inclusivity at all levels of the company. For example, we will invest $1 million over the next five years in our graduate program. The focus will be on creating opportunities for under-represented groups, including women and people of color." Guillemot sent out a company-wide letter in October 2020 summarizing their investigation, finding that nearly 25% of the employees had experienced or witnessed misconduct in the last 2 years, and that the company was implementing a 4-point plan to correct these problems, with a focus to "guarantee a working environment where everyone feels respected and safe". The company hired Raashi Sikka, Uber's former head of diversity and inclusion in Europe and Asia, as vice president of global diversity and inclusion for Ubisoft in December 2020 to follow on to this commitment.


title: Ubisoft

text: In September 2020 Michel Ancel left Ubisoft and the games industry to work on a wildlife preserve, stating that his project "Beyond Good & Evil 2" at Ubisoft and "Wild" as Wild Sheep Studio was left in good hands before he left. As part of their coverage from the sexual misconduct issues, "Libération" found that Ancel's attention towards "Beyond Good & Evil 2" to be haphazard, which had resulted in delays and restarts since the game's 1st announcement in 2010. The team considered Ancel's management style to be abusive, having dismissed some of their work and forcing them to restart on development pathways. While the team at Ubisoft Montpellier had reported on Ancel's lack of organization and leadership on the project to management as early as 2017, "Libération" claimed it was his close relationship with Yves Guillemot that allowed the situation to continue until 2020 when a more indepth review of all management was performed in wake of the sexual misconduct allegations. Ancel stated he was not aware of the issues from the team and asserts his departure was stress-related. In November 2020, Hugues Ricour, the managing director of Ubisoft Singapore, stepped down from that role after these internal reviews and remained with the company.


title: Ubisoft

text: The French trade union Solidaires Informatique initiated a class action lawsuit against Ubisoft in relation to the allegations; Solidaires Informatique had previously represented workers in a case of workplace concerns at French developer Quantic Dream. At the trial in May 2021, "Le Télégramme" reported that very little had changed within the company, as many of the HR staff that were part of the problem remained in their positions within the company, both in its France headquarters and its Canadian divisions. Employees reported to the newspaper that nothing had changed despite the new guidelines. In response to this report, Ubisoft stated that "Over a period of several months, Ubisoft has implemented major changes across its organization, internal processes and procedures in order to guarantee a safe, inclusive and respectful working environment for all team members." and "These concrete actions demonstrate the profound changes that have taken place at every level of the company. Additional initiatives are underway and are being rolled out over the coming months."


title: Ubisoft

text: Solidaires Informatique and two former Ubisoft employees filed a 2nd lawsuit within the French courts in July 2021. As translated by "Kotaku", the complaints states that Ubisoft "as a legal entity for institutional sexual harassment for setting up, maintaining and reinforcing a system where sexual harassment is tolerated because it is more profitable for the company to keep harassers in place than to protect its employees". The complaint names some of those identified during the initial 2020 accusations, including Hascoët, François, and Cornet, as directly responsible for maintaining conditions that promoted the harassment.


title: Ubisoft

text: In July 2021, Activision Blizzard was sued by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) on accusations the company maintained a hostile workplace towards women and discriminated against women in hiring and promotions. Among other reactions, this led to the Activision Blizzard employees staging a walkout on July 28, 2021 to protest the management's dismissive response to the lawsuit. About 500 employees across Ubisoft signed a letter in solidarity with the Activision Blizzard employees, stating that "It should no longer be a surprise to anyone: employees, executives, journalists, or fans that these heinous acts are going on. It is time to stop being shocked. We must demand real steps be taken to prevent them. Those responsible must be held accountable for their actions." Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot sent a letter to all Ubisoft employees in response to this open letter, stating "We have heard clearly from this letter that not everyone is confident in the processes that have been put in place to manage misconduct reports" and that "We have made important progress over the past year". This reply prompted another open letter from Ubisoft employees that derided Guillemot's response in that "Ubisoft continues to protect and promote known offenders and their allies. We see management continuing to avoid this issue", and that the company had generally ignored issues that employees have brought up. The employees' response included 3 demands of Ubisoft management, ending the cycle of simply rotating the troublesome executives and managers between studios to avoid issues, for the employees to have a collective seat in ongoing discussions to improve the workplace situation, and establishing cross-industry collaboration for how to handle future offenses that includes non-management employees as well as union representatives.


title: Ubisoft

text: In August 2021, a group of Ubisoft employees formed a workers' rights group, A Better Ubisoft, to seek more commitment and action from the company in response to the allegation from the past year. The group asked for having a seat at the table to discuss how the company was handling changes and improvements to avoid having these problems come up in the future. "Axios" reported in December 2021 that there was an "exodus" of Ubisoft employees leaving the company due to a combination to lower pay and the impact of the workplace misconduct allegation.


title: Ubisoft

text: Ubisoft Singapore began to be investigated by Singapore's Tripartite Alliance for Fair and Progressive Employment Practices in August 2021 based on reports of sexual harassment and workplace discrimination within that studio, following a July 2021 report published by "Kotaku".


title: Hedonism

text: Hedonism refers to a family of theories, all of which have in common that pleasure plays a central role in them. "Psychological" or "motivational hedonism" claims that human behavior is determined by desires to increase pleasure and to decrease pain. "Normative" or "ethical hedonism", on the other hand, is not about how we actually act but how we ought to act: we should pursue pleasure and avoid pain. "Axiological hedonism", which is sometimes treated as a part of ethical hedonism, is the thesis that only pleasure has intrinsic value. Applied to well-being or what is good for someone, it is the thesis that pleasure and suffering are the only components of well-being. These technical definitions of hedonism within philosophy, which are usually seen as respectable schools of thought, have to be distinguished from how the term is used in everyday language, sometimes referred to as "folk hedonism". In this sense, it has a negative connotation, linked to the egoistic pursuit of short-term gratification by indulging in sensory pleasures without regard for the consequences.


title: Hedonism

text: Pleasure plays a central role in all forms of hedonism; it refers to experience that feels good and involves the enjoyment of something. Pleasure contrasts with pain or suffering, which are forms of feeling bad. Discussions within hedonism usually focus more on pleasure, but as its negative side, pain is equally implied in these discussions. Both pleasure and pain come in degrees and have been thought of as a dimension going from positive degrees through a neutral point to negative degrees. The term "happiness" is often used in this tradition to refer to the balance of pleasure over pain.


title: Hedonism

text: In everyday language, the term "pleasure" is primarily associated with sensory pleasures like the enjoyment of food or sex. But in its most general sense, it includes all types of positive or pleasant experiences including the enjoyment of sports, seeing a beautiful sunset or engaging in an intellectually satisfying activity. Theories of pleasure try to determine what all these pleasurable experiences have in common, what is essential to them. They are traditionally divided into quality theories and attitude theories. Quality theories hold that pleasure is a quality of pleasurable experiences themselves while attitude theories state that pleasure is in some sense external to the experience since it depends on the subject's attitude to the experience.


title: Hedonism

text: The plausibility of the various versions of hedonism is affected by how the nature of pleasure is conceived. An important appeal of most forms of hedonism is that they are able to give a simple and unified account of their respective fields. But this is only possible if pleasure itself is a unified phenomenon. This has been put into question, mainly due to the wide variety of pleasure experiences which seem to have no one shared feature in common. One way open to quality theorists to respond to this objection is by pointing out that the hedonic tone of pleasure-experiences is not a regular quality but a higher-order quality. Attitude theories have an easier way to reply to this argument since they may hold that it is the same type of attitude, often identified with desire, that is common to all pleasurable experiences.


title: Hedonism

text: Psychological hedonism, also known as motivational hedonism, is an empirical theory about what motivates us: it states that all our actions aim at increasing pleasure and avoiding pain. This is usually understood in combination with egoism, i.e. that each person only aims at their own happiness. Our actions rely on beliefs about what causes pleasure. False beliefs may mislead us and thus our actions may fail to result in pleasure, but even failed actions are motivated by considerations of pleasure, according to psychological hedonism. The paradox of hedonism concerns the thesis that pleasure-seeking behavior is actually self-defeating in the sense that it results in less actual pleasure than would result from following other motives.


title: Hedonism

text: Psychological hedonism gives a straightforward theory explaining the totality of human behavior. It has intuitive plausibility because pleasure-seeking behavior is a common phenomenon, and may indeed dominate human conduct at times; however, the generalization of psychological hedonism as an explanation for all behavior is highly controversial. Critics point to counterexamples involving actions that seem to have no plausible explanation in terms of pleasure, such as egoistic motives for things other than pleasure (e.g. health, self-improvement, post-mortem fame), and altruistic motives (e.g. pursuing one's child's happiness, sacrificing one's life for a greater cause). Psychological hedonists reinterpret such cases in terms of pleasure-seeking behavior, for example positing that seeing one's children happy or knowing that one's death will have been meaningful brings pleasure to the person sacrificing their immediate pleasure.


title: Hedonism

text: Critics also contend that, via introspection, one can conclude that pursuit of pleasure is only one type of motivating force among others, and that reinterpreting every case in terms of pleasure/pain contradicts this. Critics also contend that psychological hedonism's basic claim of what motivates humans falls within the realm of the science of psychology rather than philosophy, and as such demands experimental evidence to confirm or contradict it.


title: Hedonism

text: Ethical hedonism or normative hedonism, as defined here, is the thesis that considerations of increasing pleasure and decreasing pain determine what we should do or which action is right. However, it is sometimes defined in a wider sense in terms of "intrinsic value", in which case it includes axiological hedonism as defined below. It is different from psychological hedonism since it prescribes rather than describes our behavior. In the narrow sense, ethical hedonism is a form of consequentialism since it determines the rightness of an action based on its consequences, which are measured here in terms of pleasure and pain. As such, it is subject to the main arguments in favor and against consequentialism. On the positive side, these include the intuition that the consequences of our actions matter and that through them we ought to make the world a better place. On the negative side, consequentialism would entail that we rarely if ever know right from wrong since our knowledge of the future is rather limited and the consequences of even simple actions may be vast. As a form of hedonism, it has some initial intuitive appeal since pleasure and pain seem to be relevant to how we should act. But it has been argued that it is morally objectionable to see pleasure and pain as the only factors relevant to what we should do since this position seems to ignore, for example, values of justice, friendship and truth. Ethical hedonism is usually concerned with both pleasure and pain. But the more restricted version in the form of negative consequentialism or negative utilitarianism focuses only on reducing suffering. Ethical hedonism is said to have been started by Aristippus of Cyrene, who held the idea that pleasure is the highest good and later was revived by Jeremy Bentham.


title: Hedonism

text: Ethical hedonist theories can be classified in relation to whose pleasure should be increased. According to the egoist version, each agent should only aim at maximizing her own pleasure. This position is usually not held in very high esteem. Altruist theories, commonly known by the term "classical utilitarianism", are more respectable in the philosophical community. They hold that the agent should maximize the sum-total of everyone's happiness. This sum-total includes the agent's pleasure as well, but only as one factor among many. A common objection against utilitarianism is that it is too demanding. This is most pronounced in cases where the agent has to sacrifice his own happiness in order to promote someone else's happiness. For example, various commentators have directed this argument against Peter Singer's position, who suggests along similar lines that the right thing to do for most people living in developed countries would be to donate a significant portion of their income to charities, which appears overly demanding to many. Singer justifies his position by pointing out that the suffering that can be avoided in third world countries this way considerably outweighs the pleasure gained from how the money would be spent otherwise. Another common objection to utilitarianism is that it disregards the personal nature of moral duties, for example, that it may be more important to promote the happiness of those close to us, e.g. of our family and friends, even if the alternative course of actions would result in slightly more happiness for a stranger.


title: Hedonism

text: Axiological hedonism is the thesis that only pleasure has intrinsic value. It has also been referred to as evaluative hedonism or value hedonism, and it is sometimes included in "ethical hedonism". A closely related theory often treated together with axiological hedonism is hedonism about well-being, which holds that pleasure and pain are the only constituents of well-being and thereby the only things that are good for someone. Central to the understanding of axiological hedonism is the distinction between "intrinsic" and "instrumental" value. An entity has "intrinsic value" if it is "good in itself" or "good for its own sake". Instrumental value, on the other hand, is ascribed to things that are valuable only as a "means" to something else. For example, tools like cars or microwaves are said to be instrumentally valuable in virtue of the function they perform, while the happiness they cause is intrinsically valuable. Axiological hedonism is a claim about intrinsic value, not about value at large.


title: Hedonism

text: Within the scope of axiological hedonism, there are two competing theories about the exact relation between pleasure and value: "quantitative hedonism" and "qualitative hedonism". Quantitative hedonists, following Jeremy Bentham, hold that the specific content or quality of a pleasure-experience is not relevant to its value, which only depends on its quantitative features: intensity and duration. For example, on this account, an experience of intense pleasure of indulging in food and sex is worth more than an experience of subtle pleasure of looking at fine art or of engaging in a stimulating intellectual conversation. Qualitative hedonists, following John Stuart Mill, object to this version on the grounds that it threatens to turn axiological hedonism into a "philosophy of swine". Instead, they argue that the quality is another factor relevant to the value of a pleasure-experience, for example, that the "lower pleasures" of the body are less valuable than the "higher pleasures" of the mind.


title: Hedonism

text: One appeal of axiological hedonism is that it provides a simple and unified account of what matters. It also reflects the introspective insight that pleasure feels valuable as something worth seeking. It has been influential throughout the history of western philosophy but has received a lot of criticism in contemporary philosophy. Most objections can roughly be divided into 2 types: (1) objections to the claim that pleasure is a sufficient condition of intrinsic value or that all pleasure is intrinsically valuable; (2) objections to the claim that pleasure is a necessary condition of intrinsic value or that there are no intrinsically valuable things other than pleasure. Opponents in the first category usually try to point to cases of pleasure that seem to either lack value or have negative value, like sadistic pleasure or pleasure due to a false belief. Qualitative hedonists can try to account for these cases by devaluing pleasures associated with the problematic qualities. Other ways to respond to this argument include rejecting the claim that these pleasures really have no or negative intrinsic value or rejecting that these cases involve pleasure at all.