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UK Industry Group Boss: Study Arts So Games Are Not Designed By 'Spotty Nerds'
nickweller writes: John Cridland is the leader of the Confederation of British Industry, a group that represents over 100,000 UK businesses. In a recent interview, he spoke about his enthusiasm for adding arts education to more traditional STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) programs. Here's how he chose to express that: "One of the biggest growth industries in Britain today is the computer games industry. We need extra coders — dozens and dozens of them but nobody is going to play a game designed by a spotty nerd. We need people with artistic flair." Cridland also expressed support for an increased emphasis on foreign language education: "If we’re not capable of speaking other people’s languages, we’re going to be in difficulties. However, there is far too much emphasis placed on teaching French and German. The language we most need going forward is Spanish (the second most frequently spoken language in the world). That and a certain percentage need to learn Mandarin to develop relations with China."
All we need to do is look at GNOME 3, Firefox 4+ and Windows 8 to see what happens when "artistic" types get involved with software development.
The end result is always a huge fucking disaster!
The old UIs, developed mainly by programmers, may have been deemed "ugly", but they were consistent and highly usable. You could use them to get real work done quickly and efficiently.
The new UIs, developed mainly by "UI designers" and "UX artisans" may be deemed pretty by such people, but they are really goddamn inconsistent and fucking unusable. You can't get work done with these, because you'll waste all of your time trying to figure out how the fuck to use the software.
Gedit is an obvious example of how these "artistic designers" completely fuck up perfectly good software UIs. Gedit used to look like this, where it had a traditional, consistent, and highly usable UI. Newer versions of Gedit look like this disaster. Yes, it's true, the GNOME 3 developers somehow managed to fuck up the user interface of a simple text editor!
We need to go back to "ugly" UIs developed by real programmers, not today's "pretty" UIs developed by terrible "designers" and "artists".
Hey feminists, see that? That's how people treat us.
We don't need games designed by nerds who have a sometimes rather weird sense of "fun". Granted. But at least those games would get played by nerds. Games designed by artists who have no connection with games would be played by NOBODY because, yes, they are artistically pleasing and maybe they will one day end up in some review of the "most beautiful games of the past", but an artist that has no idea what makes a game fun will not create a good game.
What we need is people who have an idea what makes games fun. What makes games interesting. Why people play them. And why people play THOSE games and not the ones over there. What made Kerbal Space Program a great game that was generally praised and Hatred a bad game that was generally panned? Don't bother answering, pretty much EVERYONE here knows the answer.
At least if they play games!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.