Slashdot Mirror
America's Army 3 Has Rough Launch, Development Team Canned
incognito84 writes "The development team responsible for the creation of the freeware game America's Army 3 has been canned, days after the launch of the highly flawed game, which was distributed mostly via Steam. 'The anonymous America's Army 3 developers in touch with Kotaku unsurprisingly didn't sound too pleased with the current situation, venting that "a lot of good people [worked] insanely long hours on this game that was butchered by outside sources.' The game's launch was plagued by massive server authentication issues which inhibited most players from playing it even two days afterward. One of the developers made a post on the official forums saying they were 'effectively stabbed in the back,' and that much of the funding was filtered to the bureaucracy. A patch has been released to address some of the game's issues."
Strangely, I rarely hear talk of it. For reference, see something called the Dunbar Number.
Any organization that grows over 150 (or so) people either fails or forms a personality-stomping bureaucracy to survive. It doesn't happen right away, but it always seems to happen. And, ahem, the U.S. Army has way way more than 150 people :).
I think an argument could be made that those organizations tend to split development drivers (groups of designers, etc) into sub-150 person groups which are, at least to some extent, autonomous within their given mandate.
For example, look at DARPA, which is basically designed along exactly this principle.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
I've heard that 3M corporation does this to an even greater degree. Each time a division is successful enough that it grows past 200, they break up that division's product lines into two subsets, so that they can break up the division into two sub-150 groups. The idea is that for the great majority of human evolution, we've lived in groups smaller than 150, so our brains are pretty well equipped to know and trust and work with that volume of people.
Get much larger than that and you'll start getting weird political BS. Not because people are bad, but because they need short cuts to help them deal with the overwhelming number of personalities they have to interact with to get their jobs done.
The CB App. What's your 20?
The recruitment tool that worked for me.... hmm... being bored to tears in college... and planes flying into buildings (that happened in September, I signed up in December). I wanted some adventure. I was young and still stupid enough to think that America's foreign policy might actually do the world some good. Not going to get too political now, but rest assured I don't feel the same way now. Of course they didn't spend time "drilling the horror of war" while recruiting me. That was my point, recruiters are *supposed* to blind potential recruits with "glory" and "action" and shit like that. A joke is that another name for Army recruiters is "liar." Nothing really wrong with all of this I think, it is how you get people to join the Army after all. Now, normally I would apply the same thought process to Americas Army, the video game. But I run into a moral conundrum when doing so, because Americas Army is just that, A VIDEO GAME. And who plays video games? Children play video games. If you, as a legal adult and the Army thinking that war would be anything like what you see in Americas Army (or any other video game for that matter), you are a dumb ass, and you deserve what you get. Either that, or mentally retarded in some way, shape or form. Darwinism at its finest. On the other hand, children do not have the same cognitive ability as an adult, and therefore should not be held to the same standard. The act of killing people being a fun and relaxing experience in any situation, or being able to reset a match when you get shot in the face, are just bold-faced lies when told to children. This is because children will look at the game as being official, released by the Army itself (and who knows more about war than the Army?) AND THEY WILL BELIEVE IT. My recruiter told me a story once about how he had been driving down the road in a particular Eastern-European, war-torn nation. The Humvee in front of his (they were of course driving in formation at the time) was unlucky enough to hit a landmine. "Scared the shit out of me" is the way I believe he put it. Other than that, he didn't go into too much detail as to how well (or not) the passengers of that ill-fated Humvee turned out. Now, in this situation, it wasn't really how much he did tell me about what happened as much as it was the expression on his face and the way in which he skirted around my questions that gave me a pretty good understanding of what it was like. For myself, I don't think I realized what the hell had happened until a year or two AFTER I was out of the Army. There is no thinking about what is going on while you're actually there. No time to stop and say "what in the name of FUCK am I doing here?" Because doing things such as that are counter-productive in the long run, as there really isn't much you can do to get out of the situation anyway (until your time is up). I hope this answered your questions, asshole. -Reed
And, ahem, the U.S. Army has way way more than 150 people :).
However... the typical company (or troop or battery) has approximately 100 people. You can spend as much as 10 years working at the company level before you reach Sergeant Major or Major. Some jobs, e.g. Adjutant General (which is essentially HR) are tied more closely to Big Army, but others, e.g. combat arms, are more insulated. Even now the traditional terms "troop" and "battery" are retained, even though there's some OCD bureaucrat who is waiting for the chance to wipe them out and call everything a "company."
I was a Cavalry Scout and we were aware that they were trying to wipe out personality and make us all fit neatly in to their org charts. All the (arguably stupid looking) emblems the units had painted on their HQs were painted over, they banned profanity, and of course our various alcohol sodden rituals were always causing problems for our CO, but for the most part we just ignored them and did whatever we wanted. The flip side of "don't be an individual" is that the Army also demands that you take pride in your unit.
Why did they work long hours? Against whom is the U.S. Army competing? The game, like its previous 2 incarnations, was to be free-as-in-beer.
And why is programmer psychosis so prevalent among game developers? Is it because so many developers (like me) got their start wanting to write games, hence strong competition for jobs as game developers?
Any time long hours are involved, you can be sure it is the result of one or more of at least 3 things:
* market competition forcing businesses to make promises that cannot be kept except by unreasonable behaviors, such as overtime
* lousy project management (is there such thing as competent project management? Even at firms praised by clients for having "great" PMs, I've found PMs to be lousy)
* developers with mental issues of sanity and pushback willpower
Fuck long hours - especially if they are unpaid (as is almost always the case. It is time for developers to fight-back against being taken advantage-of; we need to demonstrate that we are worthy of respect and reasonable lives too!
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?