Slashdot Mirror
Game Developers Burn Down the House
Plenty more excellent writeups to share as the Game Developer's Conference comes to an end. Gamespot has The Dark Spirit of Silent Hill, discussing how to craft the spooky survival horrors. Alice has worked her fingers to nubs writing on the Wonderland blog, and offers up Can MMOs Develop Mass Appeal?, and Burn the House Down, a ranting session between Warren Spector and some other surly curmudgeons. From the post: "But I have to say something so I want to say how this business is hopelessly broken. Haha. We're doing pretty much everything wrong. This is at the root of much of what you're gonna hear today. Games cost too much. They take too long to make. The whole concept of word of mouth, remember that? Holy cow it was nice."
Does it really surprise anyone that game developers go nuts? Those are ones of the most talented people in the industry, wasting their briliant genius on writing something completely useless. I mean, seriously, even writing the so called "spyware" (or Directed Advertising software as I prefer to call it) is more productive because at least it serves a useful purpose. Now, before you mod me as -1, Not Groupthink please let me explain and I'm sure you'll agree with me.
As an employee of a major so called "spyware" company, I guess I'm not the guy to change your minds on this site. But I've got to say, you seem to keep making the same error. Not all "spyware" companies are as bad as each other. Slashdot likes to pretend we're all cowboys who should be "rounded up" and "run out of town" or "lynched".
Our company is pretty clear what we do, we trade our program for some customer info. No drive by installations, no obfuscated terms and conditions, no download and install of other programs.
I don't blame you guys for your attitude, it must suck to work tech support on some of the machines that are worst affected by the cowboys. But we're not all like that. Remember that. At its heart we're just trying to make a living by offerring our customers better advertising, like Google Adwords. We'd all like to see legislation to herd out the cowboys. You've got more to worry about privacy issues from other things, people just use our companies as a smokescreen.
It's a pretty open secret that your IP address is logged and shared among vast sectors of cyberspace, to piece together your browsing habits, porn proclivities, etc. Hell, the technology was probably set up by you guys. Compared with that, is our buying of your browsing habits so much worse? get some priorities.
Spyware has a caring face, and this voice is not heard enough on Slashdot. For more info, look at a previous post I made on this subject here.
And that is because I am not surprised about this "burn down the house" nonsense at all. Thanks for reading.