I played hack a lot. I got the hack source, I read it. I started hacking on roguelikes. I learned C from roguelikes, and it's done okay by me.
But honestly... If you aren't ALREADY programming video games, there is no point at all in going to school for it. I was trying to write games (admittedly they sucked) by the time I was six or seven. I wrote games for Unix, I wrote games for the Amiga, I wrote games in BASIC, I wrote games in C, I wrote games in Perl, I wrote games using curses, I wrote games using plain old stdio, I wrote games using the Z-machine...
And I'm not into games programming enough to even bother to try for a job doing it.
If your answer to the question "what games have you written" doesn't include running off at the mouth for half an hour, and you're old enough to own your own computer, you are not a games programmer. Find a job you'll enjoy.
1. I've never found any evidence that the college degree is in fact worthless. Heck, my degree isn't even in my fields, but it was a great use of my time, and has done me more good than any three-four years of experience I've had since. Learning about how to learn, learning skills like effective written language skills, all that stuff pays off. So does having a bit more breadth of knowledge. I get more mileage from my psych courses than the CS majors I know get from their CS courses, for sure. 2. You don't have time to properly evaluate everyone who might apply for a job; you need a way to filter them out. You want a quick, easy, test for whether someone is basically capable of getting stuff done, learning new skills, and sticking with something for more than a month or two. College degree fits the bill. It doesn't prove that they know the field, but it proves that they know how to learn. 3. Domain-specific knowledge is pretty much irrelevant. Skill at learning is where it's at.
Basically, "what you're doing" in a real job is a hell of a lot broader than the nominal technical focus. If you had someone who was better than me by a fair margin at all the nominal technical duties of my job, but didn't have my broad spectrum of experience messing around with unrelated projects, taking half of a philosophy degree, picking up a couple of languages I've now long-since forgotten, and so on, that person couldn't do my job nearly as well as I can. Breadth wins over depth nearly every time.
If it hadn't been for Real ID, I'd still be playing. I had a lot of fun in that game, and the gameplay was still fun to me.
And no, the "optional" thing doesn't address my concerns. My biggest concern is their complete inability to acknowledge the substance of any complaints -- they've been told time and again why the real name thing is a deal breaker for many people, and they're fine with that. Well, okay. They can be fine with that without my money, 'cuz I have friends for whom the real name thing is a deal breaker. And I'm sorta one of them; I find the idea of real names in my fantasy RPG unpleasant, among other things, and yet, I really WANT the cross-game/cross-server chat functionality. You know, like the functionality that EVERY OTHER GAMING ENVIRONMENT has offered for years now, whether it's Steam, PSN, Xbox Live, or whatever. Heck, City of Heroes has working global handles (which aren't real names) and has for ages, and somehow not using real names didn't make the feature useless.... And that's why I'm playing CoH, not WoW, these days.
Not necessarily enough value to justify it, but...
I have had an iPhone for a while. I regard it as a toy. I got a G2 recently. I spent a couple of hours browsing the app market.
On the Android app market:
* About a third of the things I looked at had a 5-star review which was, in fact, spam for a warez site. ("This app is awesome! Get all apps for $9.99/month from our site, ") * Some apps had warnings such as "this app sends unauthorized text messages" or other malware-like things, apparently undisputed... but were still there. * While I am all for freedom and creativity, it seemed that every page of search results in any of several categories contained at least one thing which was obviously based on ripped off sounds, images, or something else. e.g., tons of people, none of whom were the actual show producers or staff or anything, selling "soundboxes" based on Family Guy characters.
In short... fundamentally, while I really like the abstract notion of an open market, and I like the existence of things like tethering apps... I gotta say, the openness has gotten to the point where it makes it hard for me to find software I actually want.
I actually find that I rather miss the editorial control and basic housecleaning. I think that obvious malware should not, in fact, be staying up in the store. I think that spam should be getting removed, and spammers banned -- they shouldn't be posting comments on hundreds of apps over a period of days. I am not sure I can have that without too high a cost. I certainly do like the potential of the Android market to offer apps that Apple wouldn't approve of... but it also means that some of them are genuinely Bad Shit, stuff that harms other people by being available for download, and makes trying to find software of any particular interest or value much harder than it should be.
It's a tradeoff. But there is some real value to that moderation and editorial control, even though there's also real costs to it. If we ignore those benefits, we're never going to figure out a way to compete effectively with the target market for the Apple app store.
I have a couple of transgendered friends who played WoW. They played WoW to get away from people staring at them and asking them about their gender and so on. So as long as Real ID uses legal names, they can't use it. And since, as you note, it's an awesome feature, that means they're being told that this awesome feature is not for them. You know what? Transgendered people are told plenty often already that they are not allowed to have the things they want.
I switched to City of Heroes, where they have a working global chat handle system, and it doesn't require real names. Of course, I used a variant of "seebs" as my global handle, and anyone who talks to me in the game can figure out who I am... but that's [b]me[/b]. It doesn't force everyone else to use a name that onlookers can search up in Google in five minutes.
Beyond that, though, the contempt Blizzard has shown for their user base all through this Real ID stuff was too much for me to deal with. I'll spend my money on people who at least acknowledge the complaints they get. (Blizzard has acknowledged that there were a lot of complaints, but they've never once said that any of the complaints had merit; they're too arrogant to admit that maybe they screwed up.)
Yeah. And the thing is, I could maybe comprehend if they announced it without thinking of that, but once they were told about it, they really needed to come out and say "whoops, you're right, we didn't think of that" and fix the underlying problem.
Some of the underlying functionality, people want very much -- they just don't want it to be tied to real names.
Cross-server chat, and the ability to friend a person and not have to track all their individual characters, are big features that are very desireable.
This still lacks a way to use cross-game or cross-server chat and friends lists without using real names. Without that feature, there's a lot of folks for whom Real ID is unusable... And it turns out that the functionality it offers is a really, really, big deal to many players. Because most people have multiple alts, trying to keep all the toons of a few friends listed overflows my friends list quite easily. So I can't have that functionality.
So, I cancelled my subs and went looking, and started playing City of Heroes. Where they have a global handle system which does not require you to use your real name, and lets you chat with friends across all characters, and so on. And it works.
So at this point, the three accounts I had, and my spouse's account, and our housemate's account, and a few other accounts, are just plain never coming back. Blizzard had lots of opportunities to address the foundational flaw of tying everything to a "real name". They had lots of clear-cut specific examples (people with stalkers, transgendered people, etc.) pointed out. And their solution is, months later, to say "well, you can turn it off."
Yeah, that's not gonna do any good. What we wanted was the ability to use the cross-server friend feature without tying it to real names. Without that, it's simply not a service that offers me any value.
Pretty much my position. I have gotten a couple of games for the PSP, but I haven't gotten any for the PS3 in over two years, and probably never will. (I got a PS3 originally to run Linux on it...)
Sony's just stayed nasty at a time when some other companies have been starting to open up.
And how do you "get a new union" when the current union has a legal contract saying that the employer is not allowed to hire anyone in your line of work who isn't a member of that current union?
Unions, churches, political parties... They start out because people have a vision of what they want to accomplish, but within a generation or so they exist to preserve and/or advance their own temporal power, and that means finding ways to keep people under their control.
That's a good idea in general, but I'd point out that android doesn't exactly use Objective-C with a bunch of old NextStep class libraries.... and on the whole, my response these days is "more's the pity", because I've been finding OS X/iOS development relatively livable compared to most of the other GUI toolkits I've dealt with.
For a while, records were basically gone. Then some canny people started marketing them again, creating displays for them, and so on. So record sales just went from pretty close to zero, because you had to go to special places to buy them, to not-zero. And whaddya know! RECORD-BREAKING GROWTH! This just in, one of my friends had twins, their family is growing ONE HUNDRED PERCENT PER YEAR!!!
It's almost never useful to look at percentage growth on things like this, because the famously rapid growth of small things is, in general, not particularly sustainable.
In this particular case, it's easy to see an initial market for records, but frankly, I switched to CDs because they were better, and nothing has changed since.
I have an iphone. I use it for, oh, a good five or ten percent of my browsing. If that.... But if a site doesn't work on it, I tend to stop going to that site even when I'm on a different browser. Because I had a bad experience and I didn't like it.
It doesn't matter how many page hits are iOS; it matters how many page hits are from users who use iOS enough of the time to notice that your page didn't work from their mobile browser.
I don't buy this "urban sprawl" thing. Yes, I work far from my office. About 25 miles, I think. I dunno; I go there maybe once a month.
Instead, I live in a small town, about six blocks from the grocery store, which I walk to nearly every day. I need to pick up prescriptions? I walk to the drug store. Wanna browse the used bookstore? I walk there. Going out for lunch? I walk.
Trips up to the Big City to go shopping are isolated, and we go two or three places on a single trip.
When I lived in a city, nicely centrally located and all that, we drove about 15k miles a year, now we drive maybe 3k if that. Now, the cost of getting goods here may be slightly higher -- but that's all highly efficient rail or big semis, which are costing a lot less than hundreds of individual grocery trips.
I guess it depends on what the stunt is. They have been pretty careful not to say that they're closing up shop or going out of business, and the emphasis on "in its current form" seemed pretty clear to me.
Clearly, you have never taken any kind of economics course whatsoever. Neither actual value nor money are intrinsically zero-sum things. (I suppose we could argue that both are "finite", but it's not clear where the limits would be.)
Things can indeed result in everyone being richer, or everyone being poorer, so the assumption that resources spent on one thing are always one-for-one tradeoffs with resources spent on another isn't a good assumption. The very *concept* of investment contradicts that notion.
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I played hack a lot. I got the hack source, I read it. I started hacking on roguelikes. I learned C from roguelikes, and it's done okay by me.
But honestly... If you aren't ALREADY programming video games, there is no point at all in going to school for it. I was trying to write games (admittedly they sucked) by the time I was six or seven. I wrote games for Unix, I wrote games for the Amiga, I wrote games in BASIC, I wrote games in C, I wrote games in Perl, I wrote games using curses, I wrote games using plain old stdio, I wrote games using the Z-machine...
And I'm not into games programming enough to even bother to try for a job doing it.
If your answer to the question "what games have you written" doesn't include running off at the mouth for half an hour, and you're old enough to own your own computer, you are not a games programmer. Find a job you'll enjoy.
A couple of reasons come to mind:
1. I've never found any evidence that the college degree is in fact worthless. Heck, my degree isn't even in my fields, but it was a great use of my time, and has done me more good than any three-four years of experience I've had since. Learning about how to learn, learning skills like effective written language skills, all that stuff pays off. So does having a bit more breadth of knowledge. I get more mileage from my psych courses than the CS majors I know get from their CS courses, for sure.
2. You don't have time to properly evaluate everyone who might apply for a job; you need a way to filter them out. You want a quick, easy, test for whether someone is basically capable of getting stuff done, learning new skills, and sticking with something for more than a month or two. College degree fits the bill. It doesn't prove that they know the field, but it proves that they know how to learn.
3. Domain-specific knowledge is pretty much irrelevant. Skill at learning is where it's at.
Basically, "what you're doing" in a real job is a hell of a lot broader than the nominal technical focus. If you had someone who was better than me by a fair margin at all the nominal technical duties of my job, but didn't have my broad spectrum of experience messing around with unrelated projects, taking half of a philosophy degree, picking up a couple of languages I've now long-since forgotten, and so on, that person couldn't do my job nearly as well as I can. Breadth wins over depth nearly every time.
If it hadn't been for Real ID, I'd still be playing. I had a lot of fun in that game, and the gameplay was still fun to me.
And no, the "optional" thing doesn't address my concerns. My biggest concern is their complete inability to acknowledge the substance of any complaints -- they've been told time and again why the real name thing is a deal breaker for many people, and they're fine with that. Well, okay. They can be fine with that without my money, 'cuz I have friends for whom the real name thing is a deal breaker. And I'm sorta one of them; I find the idea of real names in my fantasy RPG unpleasant, among other things, and yet, I really WANT the cross-game/cross-server chat functionality. You know, like the functionality that EVERY OTHER GAMING ENVIRONMENT has offered for years now, whether it's Steam, PSN, Xbox Live, or whatever. Heck, City of Heroes has working global handles (which aren't real names) and has for ages, and somehow not using real names didn't make the feature useless. ... And that's why I'm playing CoH, not WoW, these days.
Not necessarily enough value to justify it, but...
I have had an iPhone for a while. I regard it as a toy. I got a G2 recently. I spent a couple of hours browsing the app market.
On the Android app market:
* About a third of the things I looked at had a 5-star review which was, in fact, spam for a warez site. ("This app is awesome! Get all apps for $9.99/month from our site, ")
* Some apps had warnings such as "this app sends unauthorized text messages" or other malware-like things, apparently undisputed... but were still there.
* While I am all for freedom and creativity, it seemed that every page of search results in any of several categories contained at least one thing which was obviously based on ripped off sounds, images, or something else. e.g., tons of people, none of whom were the actual show producers or staff or anything, selling "soundboxes" based on Family Guy characters.
In short... fundamentally, while I really like the abstract notion of an open market, and I like the existence of things like tethering apps... I gotta say, the openness has gotten to the point where it makes it hard for me to find software I actually want.
I actually find that I rather miss the editorial control and basic housecleaning. I think that obvious malware should not, in fact, be staying up in the store. I think that spam should be getting removed, and spammers banned -- they shouldn't be posting comments on hundreds of apps over a period of days. I am not sure I can have that without too high a cost. I certainly do like the potential of the Android market to offer apps that Apple wouldn't approve of... but it also means that some of them are genuinely Bad Shit, stuff that harms other people by being available for download, and makes trying to find software of any particular interest or value much harder than it should be.
It's a tradeoff. But there is some real value to that moderation and editorial control, even though there's also real costs to it. If we ignore those benefits, we're never going to figure out a way to compete effectively with the target market for the Apple app store.
I would like it if it allowed nicknames.
I have a couple of transgendered friends who played WoW. They played WoW to get away from people staring at them and asking them about their gender and so on. So as long as Real ID uses legal names, they can't use it. And since, as you note, it's an awesome feature, that means they're being told that this awesome feature is not for them. You know what? Transgendered people are told plenty often already that they are not allowed to have the things they want.
I switched to City of Heroes, where they have a working global chat handle system, and it doesn't require real names. Of course, I used a variant of "seebs" as my global handle, and anyone who talks to me in the game can figure out who I am ... but that's [b]me[/b]. It doesn't force everyone else to use a name that onlookers can search up in Google in five minutes.
Beyond that, though, the contempt Blizzard has shown for their user base all through this Real ID stuff was too much for me to deal with. I'll spend my money on people who at least acknowledge the complaints they get. (Blizzard has acknowledged that there were a lot of complaints, but they've never once said that any of the complaints had merit; they're too arrogant to admit that maybe they screwed up.)
Yeah. And the thing is, I could maybe comprehend if they announced it without thinking of that, but once they were told about it, they really needed to come out and say "whoops, you're right, we didn't think of that" and fix the underlying problem.
Some of the underlying functionality, people want very much -- they just don't want it to be tied to real names.
Cross-server chat, and the ability to friend a person and not have to track all their individual characters, are big features that are very desireable.
This still lacks a way to use cross-game or cross-server chat and friends lists without using real names. Without that feature, there's a lot of folks for whom Real ID is unusable... And it turns out that the functionality it offers is a really, really, big deal to many players. Because most people have multiple alts, trying to keep all the toons of a few friends listed overflows my friends list quite easily. So I can't have that functionality.
So, I cancelled my subs and went looking, and started playing City of Heroes. Where they have a global handle system which does not require you to use your real name, and lets you chat with friends across all characters, and so on. And it works.
So at this point, the three accounts I had, and my spouse's account, and our housemate's account, and a few other accounts, are just plain never coming back. Blizzard had lots of opportunities to address the foundational flaw of tying everything to a "real name". They had lots of clear-cut specific examples (people with stalkers, transgendered people, etc.) pointed out. And their solution is, months later, to say "well, you can turn it off."
Yeah, that's not gonna do any good. What we wanted was the ability to use the cross-server friend feature without tying it to real names. Without that, it's simply not a service that offers me any value.
Pretty much my position. I have gotten a couple of games for the PSP, but I haven't gotten any for the PS3 in over two years, and probably never will. (I got a PS3 originally to run Linux on it...)
Sony's just stayed nasty at a time when some other companies have been starting to open up.
You go ahead and do that once, and tell us how many people get physically injured in the process.
And how do you "get a new union" when the current union has a legal contract saying that the employer is not allowed to hire anyone in your line of work who isn't a member of that current union?
Unions, churches, political parties... They start out because people have a vision of what they want to accomplish, but within a generation or so they exist to preserve and/or advance their own temporal power, and that means finding ways to keep people under their control.
That's a good idea in general, but I'd point out that android doesn't exactly use Objective-C with a bunch of old NextStep class libraries. ... and on the whole, my response these days is "more's the pity", because I've been finding OS X/iOS development relatively livable compared to most of the other GUI toolkits I've dealt with.
I don't care about whatever their video is. I use wikipedia from my iphone all the time, and it works fine.
Note that I don't watch the videos from ANY browser. :)
For a while, records were basically gone. Then some canny people started marketing them again, creating displays for them, and so on. So record sales just went from pretty close to zero, because you had to go to special places to buy them, to not-zero. And whaddya know! RECORD-BREAKING GROWTH! This just in, one of my friends had twins, their family is growing ONE HUNDRED PERCENT PER YEAR!!!
It's almost never useful to look at percentage growth on things like this, because the famously rapid growth of small things is, in general, not particularly sustainable.
In this particular case, it's easy to see an initial market for records, but frankly, I switched to CDs because they were better, and nothing has changed since.
Facebook FINALLY does something about privacy problems, and everyone complains. You just can't make people happy.
Yeah, now I'm sorta sad that I bought a bunch of Buckyballs, but I'll happily switch brands for my next batch.
So far as I can tell, nothing they said was untrue, people just read more into it.
I have an iphone. I use it for, oh, a good five or ten percent of my browsing. If that. ... But if a site doesn't work on it, I tend to stop going to that site even when I'm on a different browser. Because I had a bad experience and I didn't like it.
It doesn't matter how many page hits are iOS; it matters how many page hits are from users who use iOS enough of the time to notice that your page didn't work from their mobile browser.
I wouldn't dream of pretending that it's typical.
I was addressing, however, one of the key circumstances which makes ordering online relevant -- I'm not usually near stores.
They should get paid for work they did fifteen years ago because that's the deal we offered them to induce them to write games.
Social contract ftw.
I don't buy this "urban sprawl" thing. Yes, I work far from my office. About 25 miles, I think. I dunno; I go there maybe once a month.
Instead, I live in a small town, about six blocks from the grocery store, which I walk to nearly every day. I need to pick up prescriptions? I walk to the drug store. Wanna browse the used bookstore? I walk there. Going out for lunch? I walk.
Trips up to the Big City to go shopping are isolated, and we go two or three places on a single trip.
When I lived in a city, nicely centrally located and all that, we drove about 15k miles a year, now we drive maybe 3k if that. Now, the cost of getting goods here may be slightly higher -- but that's all highly efficient rail or big semis, which are costing a lot less than hundreds of individual grocery trips.
Thanks for the information. It does seem there's a large gap between what they said and what people report about it.
I guess it depends on what the stunt is. They have been pretty careful not to say that they're closing up shop or going out of business, and the emphasis on "in its current form" seemed pretty clear to me.
Exactly. I got a big stack of their games, and I was really happy with them. I hope I still have local downloaded copies. :)
>There is a finite amount of money.
Clearly, you have never taken any kind of economics course whatsoever. Neither actual value nor money are intrinsically zero-sum things. (I suppose we could argue that both are "finite", but it's not clear where the limits would be.)
Things can indeed result in everyone being richer, or everyone being poorer, so the assumption that resources spent on one thing are always one-for-one tradeoffs with resources spent on another isn't a good assumption. The very *concept* of investment contradicts that notion.