Interview With id Software's Robert A. Duffy

LEXI writes: "Accompanying our recent first set of Q3Radiant Tutorials I had the chance to interview one of the programmers behind the editor and the new engine, Mr. Robert A. Duffy of id software. 10 questions asked, 10 answers given. Topics range from personal details, education, job description, over to the new engine and the new tools, to violence in games and George W. Bush. The English original can be found here; the German translation resides at this very spot. The interview should be interesting for as well the quake player desperately awaiting the new engine, as the fresh or old-school mapper."

Comments

Re:What a waste of questions.

[zulux]

Surely people don't think we're a bunch of cowboys shooting everything in sight ala Homer Simpson.


Yep! I've met a lot of French people who think we're all a bunch of gun carying death-penalty xenophobes. Of course when they talk to me, they think I'm one of the rare polite Americans. It's kind fun to watch their reaction when I tell them that I'm pro 2nd ammendment, and feel we should hold criminals accountable for their actions. They just can't seem to grasp that there could be someone that holds these views and is still a decent and kind human being.

I've actually been quite sucuessfull in persuading a large quantitiy of French people that personal responsibility and personal accountability are the true choice of a Liberty seeking people.

It's not far from the truth

[schmaltz]

Relative to the rest of the western world, Americans have an astronomically high number of gun deaths each year. For 1998, there were 30,708 firearm-related deaths, 11,798 of which were homicides. And this was the lowest point of a 35 year downward trend.

To contrast, the United Kingdom, which has a population of around 60 million, had 49 firearm homicides in 1998. If you scale this to the US population of about 270 million in 1998, that would still only be 217 deaths. Given this, the US has roughly 50 times the firearm-related homicides of the UK.

So it's no wonder why the rest of the world thinks Americans are gun-toting cowboys... relative to them it rings true.

Just to provide balance, the United States doesn't have the highest homicide rate in the world, just of industrialized western nations. For example, Canada's homicide rate per 100,000 is about 2 in 1997, whereas the US is 7.2, yet Mexico is 14.6.

South Americans, on the other hand, enjoy an even higher homicide rate, ranging as high as 70 per 100,000 for Columbia in 1997. But Americans don't compare themselves to "third world" nations, only to G7 nations, really.

Re:It's not far from the truth

[Saib0t]

That's pretty low considering that there's probably many more than 50 times the number of guns per capita in the US than there are in the UK.

What a weird thing you're telling. IMNSHO it's totally irrelevant that the number of weapons per capita is higher, what matters is that it cost the life of 12000 people.

With death penalty and that 2nd amendment, it's really no wonder the american stereotype is a cowboy. And look at the majority of movies you export to the rest of the world: USA are depicted as a violent country with little moral values filled by cowboys, fat people watching TV and racists. Also, this whole story of the "american dream" depicted in movies translates fpr the common people into "americans are workaholics", "corporations are ran by power-hungry, selfish, discriminating people".

If I didn't know better, I'd think that too...