"Natural digital photographs aren't random," he says. "In the same way that placing a monkey in front of a typewriter is unlikely to produce a play by Shakespeare, a random set of pixels thrown on a page is unlikely to yield a natural image. It means that there are underlying statistics and regularities in naturally occurring images."
Neat turn of phrase, but the implication that those statistics and regularities that differentiate a "natural" photograph from a "doctored" one (which is not a "random" distribution of pixels, BTW) are well-understood, at least by the claimant, is as questionable as the conclusion from the above statement that the essence of intelligence, that differentiates a Shakespeare from a monkey, is well-understood.
Neat turn of phrase, but the implication that those statistics and regularities that differentiate a "natural" photograph from a "doctored" one (which is not a "random" distribution of pixels, BTW) are well-understood, at least by the claimant, is as questionable as the conclusion from the above statement that the essence of intelligence, that differentiates a Shakespeare from a monkey, is well-understood.
On the November 13 edition of 60 minutes, Kamen showed a working stirling engine, and talked about how the three initial uses Deka was focusing on were water purification and cheap power source for third world countries, and an engine for the Segway.
1. Private, public...A far more relevant discussion is whether to be an indentured employee of a large corporation, further enriching the pockets of the rich by renting your labor out and surrending control over your destiny, or be an entrepreneur and/or work for an entrepreneurial enterprise (for-profit or not), where you can share in the ownership and decision-making and responsibility for success or failure.
2. It's a sad commentary on our self-centered contemporary culture that most of this discussion revolves around $$ and benefits and security, and so little mention is made of doing work that actually contributes to society, that is fulfilling and enriching on a personal level, and that one can be proud of performing (all of which can be done in either sector).
As an engineer, you can build bombs or bridges. Both are intriguing intellectual challenges. But the choice of which to pursue matters a great deal.
Ultimately, as I am fond of saying: "If it doesn't make a difference, what's the point?"
I Pledge allegiance to the broadcast flag of the Motion Picture Association of America, and to the restrictions for which it stands; one copyright, restricted, with freedom of access for none.
Unfortunately, Evercrack is not an accident. "Reinforcement schedules", along with other odious pyschological addiction strategies, are studied widely and carefully in the online game world, and nowhere more carefully than at the utterly mercenary Verant. I've heard it directly from the mouths of all the lead developers there--the object of their games is to be addictive. Fun is incidental. Creative is incidental. Quality is incidental. Customer service is not even incidental, it is irrelevant. The model they aspire to is dealing crack cocaine.
In other words, Everquest isn't addictive because of some kind of magical, intangible entertainment value that emerged unexpectedly from mass interaction of its users, it is addictive because the designers deliberately made it that way, in order to milk every possible penny from its users, just like tobacco companies deliberately use nicotine to addict their users.
As a game developer, I find this repugnant, and it is sad that people discuss it here as if it is an interesting business tactic, and nothing more.
The total abdication of social responsibility by people in this business, particularly in the US, is sad. Of course, the moral bankruptcy of the prevailing contemporary American business philosophy is even sadder.
The current adage that making money and making sense are mutually exclusive is simply not so. It is merely a way that mercenaries try to justify their lack of conscience. It is a pathetic rationalisation for selling out, not smart business sense.
What is the point of making money, if you don't actually set out to create something of value?
Cheating is primarily a problem of game design and social architecture, not network code.
Trying to make a game mechanic around building individual stats by killing and then robbing the corpses, and then putting all the effort in trying to make the code secure, is like parachuting the naked film crew of a porn film onto the Ka'aba in Saudia Arabia and then trying to secure the set.
As long as you design for hostile, antisocial antagonistic behavior, which rewards individual achievement and penalizes collaborative behavior, don't be surprised if people play the meta-game (of breaking your game) the same way you want them to play the game.
Why make a multiplayer if you design for a bunch of stat-based single-player games running in parallel?
Many of these are no longer published, but are still available for order online. All are available for Windows and Mac.
The Logical Journey of the Zoombinies. (Broderbund) Best of the bunch. Terrific job of teaching logic, but so much fun the kids don't realize they are learning. Excellent production values (narration, sound, music, animation). Simple interface. lends itself to cooperative problem-solving (a bunch of kids around one monitor). Like a non-violent Lemmings with a twist. Came out in a teacher's kit as well as a retail version.
Math Heads. (Theatrix Interactive) Hip, music-video-style quiz-show-cum-math program.
Julliard Music Adventure. (Theatrix Interactive) Original, uses simplified sequencer to solve musical puzzles (and incidentally teach about rhythm, melody and chords) in an adventure-game wrapping.
Widget Workshop (Maxis). Wonderful. Virtual Rube-Goldberg experiments but with organic components and analog meters added. Sort of like Incredible Machines but with real scientific value.
David Macauley's The Way Things Work (Houghton Mifflin). Kids love to play around and learn about things. The most recent versions include clever games that teach about physics principles.
Lego Mindstorms. 'nuff said. Their Mars Exploration kit, among others.
Brenda Laurel's Purple Moon games, especially the Rockett series which deals realistically with social problems among adolescents, and the Secret Paths series. Wonderful multi-cultural storytelling for girls - and boys. Unfortunately, Purple Moon was bought out by Mattel.
There is a dearth of good socially-responsible interactive entertainment out there. Some of us are working to change that, but it's a long, hard road. Hope this helps in the meantime.
Re:Blockbuster did this a while back...
on
Rent-a-Game
·
· Score: 1
Read the law. It is only illegal to rent software without the express permission of the copyright holder. Before dealing with the digital copying issue, there is a simpler rationale. You can't buy a truckload of PC games as a retailer and then turn around and rent them out, because you only pay the wholesaler once, and there is no per-use compensation or royalty for the content developer and copyright owner, even though you derive continuous revenue from it. The compensation model for PC games was not historically structured to accomodate rentals.
The exception for consoles is there because the console industry lobbied hard for it. Console games have been rented for a long time, unlike PC games (especially back in 1990). The channel revenue equation for console distribution reflects this, just as videotape rentals do. Music CDs , on the other hand, or PC software, or other digital content, was not widely rented, because there was no infrastructure available for the copyright owners to capitalize on the recurring revenue stream.
You are correct about the piracy issue, however; the law was passed primarily because it is possible to make perfect copies of digital content, but not of videostapes or console game cartidges--or, (or so the thought was), copy-protected proprietary console CDs.
Remember, if the copyright owner gives permission, you can rent to your heart's content.
Actually, I think the failure of these devices is more a product of fubared marketing and lack of business vision than lack of consumer need.
Many if not all of these devices were sold with mandatory sign-up packages, such as the iPaq's original deal where you got the device essentially "free"--IF you signed up for MSN's ridiculously priced service.
The problem is that most of the early adopters for these kinds of devices already have an ISP, so the suposed "savings" were non-existent and the product ended up, in fact, being overpriced and underfeatured.
The second problem is that they viewed their business as selling the razors for a profit to recoup their initial R&D (which is really corp-speak for cutting their losses right from the start, because the muc-a-mucks never really believed they would sell enough of these to make a difference), when they should have been giving the razors away and selling razorblades.
If there was compelling content along with genuinely useful utilities that were offered through an appliance that weren't easily or as conveniently available elsewhere, people would have been hooked. If the model were to make money off a subscription for services, rather than a co-marketing deal to push a useless log-on service, and if the companies were willing to stick with it for the long haul and put some actual resources behind it, it would work. Microsoft often wins simply because they don't give up when v.1 of their products fail miserably.
Too much of shareholder-appeasement corporate culture today seeks the quick cheap hit rather than the long-term bonanza.
Ultimately, the problem is that, like so many technology products, these were created to meet a vendor's need rather than the consumer's.
My bet is that utility companies will be the ones to get this right.
Expecting the game industry to produce the Metaverse is like expecting Vince McMahon to produce Shakespeare in the Park--or like expecting Saddam Hussein to produce Tuck and Patty.
How can I explain the desperately venal internal industry reality to all you wide-eyed gamers with visions of super-frags dancing in your heads...
The game industry is to cyberpunk's vision of virtual life as Britney Spears is to The Beatles. Sorry, can't get there from here.
As for ActiveWorlds, Cybertown et al, pulEEZE. Might as well try to build warp drive out of toothpicks. Well-meaning but dead-end.
It *is* coming folks, but it takes more than T&L shaders, particle explosions, volumetric fog, antigrav breasts and steroid-pumped pecs. And it *certainly* takes more than the EQ/Ultima/Asheron/WWII's of the world have to offer.
It takes soul and artistry--and an understanding of human nature that goes beyond Pavlov and reinforcement schedules. You won't find that at EA/M$/The-Q. Nor at Hasbro/Saddam/The-Ferengi. Nor at Vivendi/Havas/The-Borg, which apparently just locked the entire Dynamix staff out of their offices and closed shop without the courtesy of advance notice, and without even letting employees clear their desks out.
Sure, their velvet Elvis's are painted with state-of-the-art brushes on the most expensive canvas money can buy propped on solid-gold easels, but they are still velvet Elvis's, and they will never be the Mona Lisa, no matter how many times they do an M & L.
Maybe I can put it in a way even/.-ers will understand:
Expecting Tomorrow from the game industry is like expecting Linux from Microsoft.
Deja Vu all over again
on
Congress@Work
·
· Score: 1
We're reliving the McCarthyite 1950's right now, and it looks like we'll have to struggle through the '60's all over again, just to regain the freedoms we already won.
Only this time, they're blocking bits instead of burning books, the Supreme Court is on their side, we're shooting each other rather than the Vietnamese, free sex is potentially lethal, and it's virtually impossible for kids to shock their parents.
Dylan still can't sing.
Oh, and the Bug finally has air-conditioning.
"It's all just a little bit of history repeating."
Flout 'em and scout 'em,
and scout 'em and flout 'em;
Analysis accompanying several of the images (#49, #52) notes the appearance of "writing". You might wonder what the Martians might wish to communicate at such a grand scale.
"Coincidentally," back in February, I painstakingly "enhanced" the images of magnetite chains in Martian meteorite ALH84001, which NASA announced appeared to be of "biological" origin.
My Photoshop skills are "rudimentary," but, like those intrepid explorers at "Metaresearch," that did not deter me from improving these blurry images to reveal their hidden meaning.
What I have uncovered is quite startling. As you can see, those clever Martians were not content to communicate on the "meta" scale, they made sure to leave us messages at the microscopic level as well.
http://www.galiel.com/aybabtu/magnetitechain.jpg
(the "original" NASA images, clearly "modified" by "agents" of "THEM", can be found here:
http://amesnews.arc.nasa.gov/releases/2001/01image s/magneticbacteria/bacteria.html
The "press" release is here:
http://amesnews.arc.nasa.gov/releases/2001/01_11AR.html
The "truth" is out there, people. It's way, way, waaaaay out there.
P.S. (Ever notice how both "NASA" and "THEM" have four letters? Kinda makes you wonder, doesn't it....)
Flout 'em and scout 'em,
and scout 'em and flout 'em;
What causes 'cheating' and other 'anti-social behavior' in current MMP games is a series of fundamental design flaws, deeply ingrained into the culture of the game developer community, exacerbated by a misguided belief that human society is as amenable to technological manipulation as AI code. It has nothing to do with exposing the client.
The flaws:
- Anonymity without authentication and persistence of identity (I'm not just talking from the developer/server security perspective, which is all that gets attention in the industry; I'm talking about the importance of those three features for healthy interaction among and between human members of an online community)
- Malthusian, (faux-)closed-system game mechanics, where the optimal strategy (and often explicit purpose) is to gain personal power by killing others and stealing their stuff, and where there is no device to recognize nor quantify the synergetic creation of community value;
- Abstract, symbolic, stat-based (read: easy to quantify and shove in a database table) substitutions for the breadth and depth of human experience. Stats are an anchronistic legacy ill-suited for a networked environment. Online Game developers are still trapped in man-vs-machine dynamics. In an online world, populated with real people, 'reputation' can (and should) be more than a database entry, 'skill' more than a roll of the die, and 'power' more than an abstract product of macros and having no actual life.
Frankly, my peers in the industry all sincerely believe that they can literally *engineer* better societies into being, that all it takes is tighter code to solve anger and greed and hate and venality (and that, on the other hand, they can write subroutines for trust and honor and humor and epiphany). They expend tremendous energy in a wasteful search for responsive AI and fool-proof rules, while squandering the resource of the collective eons of human experience embodied in their player community.
The more they fail and the more disfunctional their player communities, the more code they write, database tables they build, and rules, limitations and barriers they erect to players' freedom and self-expression and self-government. "Never trust the client" is a mantra that invisibly and inevitably expands in the mind of developers into "never trust the player". The name of the development game has morphed from 'serving the players' into surviving them.
That is one of the reasons that, despite the incredible immersive power of these technologies, they reach but a tiny portion of their potential audience.
If you build worlds where the political, economic and social fabric is woven by a human network, where the developers are to players as experienced directors are to powerful actors, rather than parents are to wayward children, where the lessons learned from functional RL societies are adapted to the circumstances of online community, where people enjoy anonymity and the freedom to live their fictions, but are still accountable and held responsible for their interactions in a community, and where the collective efforts of participants builds new wealth, rather than necessitating squabling over finite resources;
If you build world where, in other words, the ethos of the network prevails over the ethos of the oilwell;
Well, then, an open source engine is a source of delight and inspiration, rather than a subject of fear and loathing.
As someone working hard to build such worlds, I certainly wish them success.
Flout 'em and scout 'em,
and scout 'em and flout 'em;
Slashdot Mirror
"Natural digital photographs aren't random," he says. "In the same way that placing a monkey in front of a typewriter is unlikely to produce a play by Shakespeare, a random set of pixels thrown on a page is unlikely to yield a natural image. It means that there are underlying statistics and regularities in naturally occurring images."
Neat turn of phrase, but the implication that those statistics and regularities that differentiate a "natural" photograph from a "doctored" one (which is not a "random" distribution of pixels, BTW) are well-understood, at least by the claimant, is as questionable as the conclusion from the above statement that the essence of intelligence, that differentiates a Shakespeare from a monkey, is well-understood.
Neat turn of phrase, but the implication that those statistics and regularities that differentiate a "natural" photograph from a "doctored" one (which is not a "random" distribution of pixels, BTW) are well-understood, at least by the claimant, is as questionable as the conclusion from the above statement that the essence of intelligence, that differentiates a Shakespeare from a monkey, is well-understood.
Right on the "What you should know" page, prominently indicated, is says:
"Important: Customers who have deployed Windows XP Service Pack 2 RC2 are not at risk."
http://www.sanyo.co.jp/koho/hypertext4-eng/0211new s-e/1106-e.html
Of course, *this* is my idea of a real guard robot:
http://www.robosaurus.com/inaction.html
On the November 13 edition of 60 minutes, Kamen showed a working stirling engine, and talked about how the three initial uses Deka was focusing on were water purification and cheap power source for third world countries, and an engine for the Segway.
we typically have BS degrees
So now they give lawyers a degree in BS? How appropriate.
[sigh]too much time on UBB's[/sigh]
[i]we typically have BS degrees[/i]
So now they give lawyers a degree in BS? How appropriate.
1. Private, public...A far more relevant discussion is whether to be an indentured employee of a large corporation, further enriching the pockets of the rich by renting your labor out and surrending control over your destiny, or be an entrepreneur and/or work for an entrepreneurial enterprise (for-profit or not), where you can share in the ownership and decision-making and responsibility for success or failure.
2. It's a sad commentary on our self-centered contemporary culture that most of this discussion revolves around $$ and benefits and security, and so little mention is made of doing work that actually contributes to society, that is fulfilling and enriching on a personal level, and that one can be proud of performing (all of which can be done in either sector).
As an engineer, you can build bombs or bridges. Both are intriguing intellectual challenges. But the choice of which to pursue matters a great deal.
Ultimately, as I am fond of saying:
"If it doesn't make a difference, what's the point?"
I Pledge allegiance to the broadcast flag of the Motion Picture Association of America, and to the restrictions for which it stands; one copyright, restricted, with freedom of access for none.
Unfortunately, Evercrack is not an accident. "Reinforcement schedules", along with other odious pyschological addiction strategies, are studied widely and carefully in the online game world, and nowhere more carefully than at the utterly mercenary Verant. I've heard it directly from the mouths of all the lead developers there--the object of their games is to be addictive. Fun is incidental. Creative is incidental. Quality is incidental. Customer service is not even incidental, it is irrelevant. The model they aspire to is dealing crack cocaine.
In other words, Everquest isn't addictive because of some kind of magical, intangible entertainment value that emerged unexpectedly from mass interaction of its users, it is addictive because the designers deliberately made it that way, in order to milk every possible penny from its users, just like tobacco companies deliberately use nicotine to addict their users.
As a game developer, I find this repugnant, and it is sad that people discuss it here as if it is an interesting business tactic, and nothing more.
The total abdication of social responsibility by people in this business, particularly in the US, is sad. Of course, the moral bankruptcy of the prevailing contemporary American business philosophy is even sadder.
The current adage that making money and making sense are mutually exclusive is simply not so. It is merely a way that mercenaries try to justify their lack of conscience. It is a pathetic rationalisation for selling out, not smart business sense.
What is the point of making money, if you don't actually set out to create something of value?
Cheating is primarily a problem of game design and social architecture, not network code.
Trying to make a game mechanic around building individual stats by killing and then robbing the corpses, and then putting all the effort in trying to make the code secure, is like parachuting the naked film crew of a porn film onto the Ka'aba in Saudia Arabia and then trying to secure the set.
As long as you design for hostile, antisocial antagonistic behavior, which rewards individual achievement and penalizes collaborative behavior, don't be surprised if people play the meta-game (of breaking your game) the same way you want them to play the game.
Why make a multiplayer if you design for a bunch of stat-based single-player games running in parallel?
Many of these are no longer published, but are still available for order online. All are available for Windows and Mac.
The Logical Journey of the Zoombinies. (Broderbund) Best of the bunch. Terrific job of teaching logic, but so much fun the kids don't realize they are learning. Excellent production values (narration, sound, music, animation). Simple interface. lends itself to cooperative problem-solving (a bunch of kids around one monitor). Like a non-violent Lemmings with a twist. Came out in a teacher's kit as well as a retail version.
Math Heads. (Theatrix Interactive) Hip, music-video-style quiz-show-cum-math program.
Julliard Music Adventure. (Theatrix Interactive) Original, uses simplified sequencer to solve musical puzzles (and incidentally teach about rhythm, melody and chords) in an adventure-game wrapping.
Widget Workshop (Maxis). Wonderful. Virtual Rube-Goldberg experiments but with organic components and analog meters added. Sort of like Incredible Machines but with real scientific value.
David Macauley's The Way Things Work (Houghton Mifflin). Kids love to play around and learn about things. The most recent versions include clever games that teach about physics principles.
Lego Mindstorms. 'nuff said. Their Mars Exploration kit, among others.
Brenda Laurel's Purple Moon games, especially the Rockett series which deals realistically with social problems among adolescents, and the Secret Paths series. Wonderful multi-cultural storytelling for girls - and boys. Unfortunately, Purple Moon was bought out by Mattel.
There is a dearth of good socially-responsible interactive entertainment out there. Some of us are working to change that, but it's a long, hard road. Hope this helps in the meantime.
Read the law. It is only illegal to rent software without the express permission of the copyright holder. Before dealing with the digital copying issue, there is a simpler rationale. You can't buy a truckload of PC games as a retailer and then turn around and rent them out, because you only pay the wholesaler once, and there is no per-use compensation or royalty for the content developer and copyright owner, even though you derive continuous revenue from it. The compensation model for PC games was not historically structured to accomodate rentals.
The exception for consoles is there because the console industry lobbied hard for it. Console games have been rented for a long time, unlike PC games (especially back in 1990). The channel revenue equation for console distribution reflects this, just as videotape rentals do. Music CDs , on the other hand, or PC software, or other digital content, was not widely rented, because there was no infrastructure available for the copyright owners to capitalize on the recurring revenue stream.
You are correct about the piracy issue, however; the law was passed primarily because it is possible to make perfect copies of digital content, but not of videostapes or console game cartidges--or, (or so the thought was), copy-protected proprietary console CDs.
Remember, if the copyright owner gives permission, you can rent to your heart's content.
Actually, I think the failure of these devices is more a product of fubared marketing and lack of business vision than lack of consumer need.
Many if not all of these devices were sold with mandatory sign-up packages, such as the iPaq's original deal where you got the device essentially "free"--IF you signed up for MSN's ridiculously priced service.
The problem is that most of the early adopters for these kinds of devices already have an ISP, so the suposed "savings" were non-existent and the product ended up, in fact, being overpriced and underfeatured.
The second problem is that they viewed their business as selling the razors for a profit to recoup their initial R&D (which is really corp-speak for cutting their losses right from the start, because the muc-a-mucks never really believed they would sell enough of these to make a difference), when they should have been giving the razors away and selling razorblades.
If there was compelling content along with genuinely useful utilities that were offered through an appliance that weren't easily or as conveniently available elsewhere, people would have been hooked. If the model were to make money off a subscription for services, rather than a co-marketing deal to push a useless log-on service, and if the companies were willing to stick with it for the long haul and put some actual resources behind it, it would work. Microsoft often wins simply because they don't give up when v.1 of their products fail miserably.
Too much of shareholder-appeasement corporate culture today seeks the quick cheap hit rather than the long-term bonanza.
Ultimately, the problem is that, like so many technology products, these were created to meet a vendor's need rather than the consumer's.
My bet is that utility companies will be the ones to get this right.
Expecting the game industry to produce the Metaverse is like expecting Vince McMahon to produce Shakespeare in the Park--or like expecting Saddam Hussein to produce Tuck and Patty.
/.-ers will understand:
How can I explain the desperately venal internal industry reality to all you wide-eyed gamers with visions of super-frags dancing in your heads...
The game industry is to cyberpunk's vision of virtual life as Britney Spears is to The Beatles. Sorry, can't get there from here.
As for ActiveWorlds, Cybertown et al, pulEEZE. Might as well try to build warp drive out of toothpicks. Well-meaning but dead-end.
It *is* coming folks, but it takes more than T&L shaders, particle explosions, volumetric fog, antigrav breasts and steroid-pumped pecs. And it *certainly* takes more than the EQ/Ultima/Asheron/WWII's of the world have to offer.
It takes soul and artistry--and an understanding of human nature that goes beyond Pavlov and reinforcement schedules. You won't find that at EA/M$/The-Q. Nor at Hasbro/Saddam/The-Ferengi. Nor at Vivendi/Havas/The-Borg, which apparently just locked the entire Dynamix staff out of their offices and closed shop without the courtesy of advance notice, and without even letting employees clear their desks out.
Sure, their velvet Elvis's are painted with state-of-the-art brushes on the most expensive canvas money can buy propped on solid-gold easels, but they are still velvet Elvis's, and they will never be the Mona Lisa, no matter how many times they do an M & L.
Maybe I can put it in a way even
Expecting Tomorrow from the game industry is like expecting Linux from Microsoft.
We're reliving the McCarthyite 1950's right now, and it looks like we'll have to struggle through the '60's all over again, just to regain the freedoms we already won.
Only this time, they're blocking bits instead of burning books, the Supreme Court is on their side, we're shooting each other rather than the Vietnamese, free sex is potentially lethal, and it's virtually impossible for kids to shock their parents.
Dylan still can't sing.
Oh, and the Bug finally has air-conditioning.
"It's all just a little bit of history repeating."
Flout 'em and scout 'em,
and scout 'em and flout 'em;
Analysis accompanying several of the images (#49, #52) notes the appearance of "writing". You might wonder what the Martians might wish to communicate at such a grand scale.
"Coincidentally," back in February, I painstakingly "enhanced" the images of magnetite chains in Martian meteorite ALH84001, which NASA announced appeared to be of "biological" origin.
My Photoshop skills are "rudimentary," but, like those intrepid explorers at "Metaresearch," that did not deter me from improving these blurry images to reveal their hidden meaning.
What I have uncovered is quite startling. As you can see, those clever Martians were not content to communicate on the "meta" scale, they made sure to leave us messages at the microscopic level as well.
http://www.galiel.com/aybabtu/magnetitechain.jpg
(the "original" NASA images, clearly "modified" by "agents" of "THEM", can be found here:e s/magneticbacteria/bacteria.html
http://amesnews.arc.nasa.gov/releases/2001/01imag
The "press" release is here: http://amesnews.arc.nasa.gov/releases/2001/01_11AR .html
The "truth" is out there, people. It's way, way, waaaaay out there.
P.S. (Ever notice how both "NASA" and "THEM" have four letters? Kinda makes you wonder, doesn't it....)
Flout 'em and scout 'em,
and scout 'em and flout 'em;
What causes 'cheating' and other 'anti-social behavior' in current MMP games is a series of fundamental design flaws, deeply ingrained into the culture of the game developer community, exacerbated by a misguided belief that human society is as amenable to technological manipulation as AI code. It has nothing to do with exposing the client.
The flaws:
- Anonymity without authentication and persistence of identity (I'm not just talking from the developer/server security perspective, which is all that gets attention in the industry; I'm talking about the importance of those three features for healthy interaction among and between human members of an online community)
- Malthusian, (faux-)closed-system game mechanics, where the optimal strategy (and often explicit purpose) is to gain personal power by killing others and stealing their stuff, and where there is no device to recognize nor quantify the synergetic creation of community value;
- Abstract, symbolic, stat-based (read: easy to quantify and shove in a database table) substitutions for the breadth and depth of human experience. Stats are an anchronistic legacy ill-suited for a networked environment. Online Game developers are still trapped in man-vs-machine dynamics. In an online world, populated with real people, 'reputation' can (and should) be more than a database entry, 'skill' more than a roll of the die, and 'power' more than an abstract product of macros and having no actual life.
Frankly, my peers in the industry all sincerely believe that they can literally *engineer* better societies into being, that all it takes is tighter code to solve anger and greed and hate and venality (and that, on the other hand, they can write subroutines for trust and honor and humor and epiphany). They expend tremendous energy in a wasteful search for responsive AI and fool-proof rules, while squandering the resource of the collective eons of human experience embodied in their player community.
The more they fail and the more disfunctional their player communities, the more code they write, database tables they build, and rules, limitations and barriers they erect to players' freedom and self-expression and self-government. "Never trust the client" is a mantra that invisibly and inevitably expands in the mind of developers into "never trust the player". The name of the development game has morphed from 'serving the players' into surviving them.
That is one of the reasons that, despite the incredible immersive power of these technologies, they reach but a tiny portion of their potential audience.
If you build worlds where the political, economic and social fabric is woven by a human network, where the developers are to players as experienced directors are to powerful actors, rather than parents are to wayward children, where the lessons learned from functional RL societies are adapted to the circumstances of online community, where people enjoy anonymity and the freedom to live their fictions, but are still accountable and held responsible for their interactions in a community, and where the collective efforts of participants builds new wealth, rather than necessitating squabling over finite resources;
If you build world where, in other words, the ethos of the network prevails over the ethos of the oilwell;
Well, then, an open source engine is a source of delight and inspiration, rather than a subject of fear and loathing.
As someone working hard to build such worlds, I certainly wish them success.
Flout 'em and scout 'em,
and scout 'em and flout 'em;
House calls.
Flout 'em and scout 'em,
and scout 'em and flout 'em;