Harvey Smith's Peace Bomb idea sounds great. To sustain its community base, the game would need some incentive for players to keep playing, because in this case the "grind" would be genuinely valuable. Possibly players would make micropayments for small in-game enhancements, such as avatar wardrobe or something; then the payments would be aggregated and paid out to one winner at the end of each community project, voted by each member present at the project. If there were a genuine profit incentive, this would draw a lot of idle players.
All forms of government fail because they all forget to factor in 1 key element. Human Nature. [...] Actually capitalism works simply because of human nature.
Capitalism, believe it or not, isn't a form of government. It's an economic system. Economic systems, believe it or not, aren't forms of government. They just take over governments.
Who is most "popular" in high school? It isn't the teachers or the administrator, or their children. The teachers and administration designed the system (replace "teachers and administration" with "board of education" if you prefer). While the writer in the example gave other writers a higher credit score with Wal-Mart, no matter how much pain is taken by the administration, they have very little measurable influence on their children's (or favored student's) social success. Granted, they can influence academic success or athletic success, but these are not analogous to the reputation upon which the new economy is to be based.
This presumes the educators were trying to engineer the system to make themselves popular. It seems clear the highest school officials designed the system to give themselves power, and in that they succeeded. Every public school is a top-down autocracy.
A society-wide system might instead grow in any number of directions, to satisfy many purposes a school system doesn't have. Were some central authority in charge, as in a school district, the designers of the system would indeed have no way to leverage the system to benefit themselves. But if the system grows incrementally, through the work of countless agents (as the monetary system did historically), intelligent designers can become familiar with the vagaries of the rules and tune them both to serve the culture better and, incidentally, to benefit themselves.
in the future life will be like a small high school where everyone has cell phones?
Credit scores represent one limited example of the idea, as do eBay feedback ratings and other examples I cite in the article. What's missing as of now, obviously, are interoperability, universal instant access, and what Slashdot would call "user moderation."
We "could have said all that about the Internet 20 years ago"? You mean 20 years ago I could have seen you, a stranger, across the street, and accessed the net to determine instantly whether we had acquaintances in common, or acquaintances of acquaintances, and whether you owed any of them money and how much, and whether you had stolen away someone's girlfriend, and how often you got into traffic accidents? Boy, that 1985 Internet was really something.
It's clear I "don't understand anything about economics"? I guess to prove that you could have summoned up my school records using the magic 1985 Internet, but what specifically makes you say that now?
I wrote that article, and in it I make exactly that point: It's an incremental process, likely to take place over centuries. But that doesn't mean there's no place for intentional design; after all, the world of finance is filled with countless rules, and they didn't just sprout like grass. Every rule was designed, by a committee or individual or corporation.
Best possible time to plug The Escapist magazine. Yeah, I know, you hate the layout -- but (I speak here as a writer for the site) its journalism stands comparison with "real" magazines.
Re:Interesting tidbits from the article
on
EA's Conquest of Origin
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
why was your article cut for space at the expense of clarity when, to the best of my knowledge, The Escapist is 100% digital distribution?
Sorry, I misspoke. I should have said "cut for length," not for space. The Escapist pays by the word, and so the more they published, the more they would have to pay me. They gave me a target length of 3,000 words, which is presumably what they budgeted for; in the event, the article was nearly 3,600 words.
The author seems bitter that EA insisted that projects actually stay on schedule.
I wrote that Escapist article. The problem with EA's management of Origin wasn't that EA insisted EA adhere to a schedule, but that EA tried to schedule every game as if it were a sports game. My article ran long and so I had to cut quite a bit for space. One point I wanted to make, but had no room for, was that EA routinely rotates its studio managers on a one-year cycle, which accommodates its successful sports game schedule. For the kinds of games Origin made, though -- games that required several years to realize -- this proved disastrous. A new manager (with his own personal agenda) would arrive late in the year, cancel projects and order layoffs, start a new slate of projects, order new hiring, and then a year would go by and bam! the new manager would arrive and start the cycle all over again.
This is not "EA insisting Origin adhere to a schedule." This is a fundamental disjuncture between the corporate HQ's philosophy and the Origin approach.
Origin would have been still around if EA didn't buy them
This is incorrect, assuming you mean Origin would still be an independent publisher. As I interviewed ex-Originites for the Escapist article, the theme that emerged was that by 1992 Origin definitely had either to find a buyer or go out of business. The company's position as a publisher was unsustainable in the changing market.
It is certainly possible the right buyer (i.e., someone other than EA) might have kept Origin largely intact in body and spirit as a studio, even to this day. But as I describe in the article, EA's internal politics, and its attempt to produce all games the way it produces sports games, made it impossible for them to exploit Origin effectively.
Unfortunately, in real life it was all too easy to kill a buffalo with a rifle. In later decades hunters would kill vast numbers of buffalos and take only the tongues. So I wanted kids to feel a sense of shame for killing too much and then wasting the kill.
Hunters were paid by large railroad concerns to destroy entire herds for several reasons:
The herds formed the basis of the economies of local Plains tribes of Native Americans.
Herds of these large animals on tracks could damage locomotives when the trains failed to stop in time.
Herds often took shelter in the artificial cuts formed by the grade of the track winding though hills and mountains in harsh winter conditions. This could hold up a train for days.
Besides this, Bison skins were valuable for industry, clothing such as robes, and rugs. Old West Bison hunting was very often a big commercial enterprise, involving organized teams of one or two professional hunters, skinners, cartridge reloaders, cooks, wranglers, blacksmiths, security guards, teamsters and large numbers of horse and wagons. Some of these professional hunters such as "Buffalo Bill" Cody killed over a hundred animals at a single stand and many thousands in their career. A good hide could bring $3.00 in Dodge City, and a very good one $50.00 in an era when a laborer would be lucky to make a dollar a day.
Proposals to protect the Bison were discouraged, as it was recognized that the Plains Indians, often at war with the United States, depended on Bison for their way of life. General Phillip Sheridan spoke to the Texas Legislature against a proposal to outlaw commercial Bison hunting for that reason, and President Grant also "pocket vetoed" a similar Federal bill to protect the dwindling Bison herds. By 1884 the American Bison was close to extinction.
I suggest this kind of history is valid for inclusion in a historical game about the Oregon Trail.
"The second pill costs six cents; the first pill costs five hundred million dollars." -- Aaron Sorkin, The West Wing.
I'm sure Intel will be happy to sell you the second processor that rolls off any given production line for $40, as long as you also buy the first one, which costs -- what would it be? -- about $200,000,000 or so?
Doctor Strange is a good character. His backstory is all about redemption, a good theme for both comics and movies. Many Marvel writers have told good stories about Strange over the last four decades. He also fulfills a valuable narrative role in the Marvel universe; he's the Sorcerer Supreme, or at least he was last time I looked.
Shang-Chi had a long run of good stories in the 1970s title Master of Kung Fu. They were interesting for their leavening of philosophy. It wouldn't be at all hard to turn that book into a decent kung fu movie.
The best and most bracing recent analysis I've seen of the Shuttle and its current situation is A Rocket to Nowhere by one Maciej Ceglowski. "The goal cannot be to have a safe space program -- rocket science is going to remain difficult and risky. But we have the right to demand that the space program have some purpose beyond trying to keep its participants alive. NASA needs to take a lesson in courage from its astronauts, and demand either a proper, funded mandate for manned exploration, or close down the program. By NASA's own arguments, the commercial, technological and intellectual allure of manned space exploration are so great that it will not be a hard case to make. But even if the worst happens and the Shuttles are mothballed, with the ISS left abandoned, the loss to science will have been negligible. That is the great tragedy of the current 'return to flight', and the sooner we force the agency to confront its failure, the greater our chances of salvaging a space program worth keeping out of the current mess."
It's interesting and depressing how many Slashdotters posting here think "game design" is the same as "game programming." But then, historically most people have never given a moment's thought to the idea someone actually invented the rules of the games they play.
I know for a fact this is changing, because I keep getting e-mail from elementary and junior-high school students doing assignments from their teachers. They're supposed to write to a game designer and get him to answer X number of questions the teacher has provided. For inscrutable reasons, when you type the exact term "game designer" into Google, my home page shows up on the first page, higher than any other individual designer. (Yeah, I know -- you've never heard of me.) Weird and unjust, but my penance for this fame is that all these kids write to me with their time-wasting questions. So I know at least some people are starting to recognize "game design" as a job, if not yet as a profession. Hope Slashdot follows pretty soon...
Everyone talks about Ed Wood, Jr. being a totally incompetent filmmaker, but that is incorrect. Wood was selectively incompetent, which is far more interesting.
Genuinely incompetent films are incomprehensible; they're so badly written, filmed, lit, recorded, and edited you can't tell what's supposed to be happening moment to moment. They're dull. Ed Wood's films are interesting because he so weirdly mixes okay technical competence -- in the sense that you can follow the storytelling from scene to scene, because he tells it with acceptable narrative cohesion -- with utterly whacked-out, surreally incompetent plotting. He couches nonsensical ideas in the most portentous yet tone-deaf language. He displays a glorious ignorance of taste -- not "bad taste" in the too-conscious John-Waters sense, but a genuine vacuity of any informed sensibility at all.
Ed Wood is, in fact, an interesting filmmaker. This is true. If you've ever sat with an audience watching Glen or Glenda?, they stay all the way through, and the final scene has them cheering. Wood disastrously fails to engage his audience on the emotional level he intended, but he nonetheless engages them. A genuine incompetent couldn't do this.
I think Ed Wood is a telling case study that illuminates what we really mean when we talk about "genius."
Seems like if you can do this with the keratin of a fingernail, you could probably also inscribe information on a single hair. This raises all kinds of ideas for future spy novels -- data smugglers carrying nothing visible, but the hair on their scalp holds all the source code for Microsoft's entire product line....
I only wish the 'negative vibe' against advertising would prompt a wider examination of its toxic effects on society. For some inexplicable reason Adbbusters and No Logo don't get a lot of exposure on commercial TV networks, wonder why?
We have lost, almost completely, the concept of pandering as harmful. In the Divine Comedy, Dante put the panders in the sixth circle of Hell, lower (and hence worse than) than the murderers. Someday a lot of DoubleClick guys will join them...
QuarkVsInDesign.com is an interesting site for desktop publishing professionals, run by one "Pariah S. Burke," that covers the rivalry between the programs. As you can see from the many comments on this March 29th thread, Quark : Postcards From the Edge, the animosity toward Quark has grown pervasive.
My physics professor at the University of Nevada Reno, the late Samuel Goudsmit (best known as co-discoverer of the electron's spin), was technical lead on the ALSOS project immediately after World War II. His team went into Berlin and certain other areas shortly after the Allies captured them, in order to sieze any Nazi nuclear material and atom bomb research. They found lots of stuff, then spent a few months studying it closely.
As described in the Wikipedia article (and in Goudsmit's 1947 book, ALSOS: The failure of German science), the Germans never got even remotely close to developing an A-bomb. Their approach to the physics was fundamentally mistaken and would never have led to anything workable. Good news for civilization, bad news for alternate-history writers and sensationalist journalists, but in any case conclusively settled. Goudsmit was a smart guy and knew his stuff.
I recognize that many/most Slashdotters automatically deduct 50 pts from my perceived IQ when I mention my AOL account -- I guess excellent Karma doesn't compensate -- so if you're one of those, you can tune out the rest of this.
Obviously AOL's spam filter is too aggressive, but it does work. (I get maybe 4-6 spams a day, which must compare favorably to Cmdr Taco.) The problems are, you can't permanently whitelist a single sender without turning your entire inbox whitelist-only, and the filter is damn near untrainable. I've been telling it my invitation-only industry mailing list is okay for, what is it, five years now. Hasn't learned yet.
AOL experimented briefly with a different, user-trainable e-mail client called, I think, Communicator. (It wasn't just a rebranded Netscape Communicator.) Trouble was, it sucked down every single e-mail onto your hard drive before you could start training it, including viruses. Yeah, thanks.
I keep my AOL account because it's been my professional front for 15 years, and because my wife's family is on the account too. Vendor lock-in sucks.
It startled me to see a Gamespot story linking to my own bibliography. This was part of the reporter's detective work in trying to deduce the nature of Warren's current project. I worked for Warren at the Austin, TX office of Looking Glass Studios (then Looking Glass Technologies) in the mid-'90s on a game with the working title "Junction Point." I don't know what Warren's current plans are, but I'm willing to bet he isn't trying to resurrect that game. I expect he chose the name purely for sentimental reasons.
By the way, in case anyone cares, the Gamespot story gets one detail wrong: I didn't work with Warren at TSR. Rather, we worked together at Steve Jackson Games in the mid-'80s, where he was Editor-in-Chief and I was the lowly assistant editor. Warren worked for TSR after leaving SJG, and was involved in AD&D 2nd edition there. I never worked at TSR myself, though I did a lot of freelance work for them.
Flash is not the web. therefore, you can't bookmark it, index it, search it. You can't look at the code, or make the text bigger, or have your text reader read it because you are blind
Wow, this post must date from, what, 2000? Haven't looked at Flash in a while, have you? Every point you raise has been addressed in the last couple of versions.
The 1954 novella "The Houses of Iszm" by Jack Vance postulated custom-grown treehouse homes. From Rich Horton's review:
I didn't like
The Houses of Iszm quite as much [as "Son of the Tree"], though by and large it's fairly comparable in quality. It even shares a trope -- trees big enough to live in. The planet Iszm controls the supply of these trees by strictly preventing the export of female trees. Ailie Farr is a botanist who comes to Iszm and eventually gets involved in a scheme to steal a female tree, with surprising results. [...] Again, a nice story for early Vance, not a classic.
Slashdot Mirror
Harvey Smith's Peace Bomb idea sounds great. To sustain its community base, the game would need some incentive for players to keep playing, because in this case the "grind" would be genuinely valuable. Possibly players would make micropayments for small in-game enhancements, such as avatar wardrobe or something; then the payments would be aggregated and paid out to one winner at the end of each community project, voted by each member present at the project. If there were a genuine profit incentive, this would draw a lot of idle players.
All forms of government fail because they all forget to factor in 1 key element. Human Nature. [...] Actually capitalism works simply because of human nature. Capitalism, believe it or not, isn't a form of government. It's an economic system. Economic systems, believe it or not, aren't forms of government. They just take over governments.
This presumes the educators were trying to engineer the system to make themselves popular. It seems clear the highest school officials designed the system to give themselves power, and in that they succeeded. Every public school is a top-down autocracy.
A society-wide system might instead grow in any number of directions, to satisfy many purposes a school system doesn't have. Were some central authority in charge, as in a school district, the designers of the system would indeed have no way to leverage the system to benefit themselves. But if the system grows incrementally, through the work of countless agents (as the monetary system did historically), intelligent designers can become familiar with the vagaries of the rules and tune them both to serve the culture better and, incidentally, to benefit themselves.
Sounds like an excellent way to put it.
Uh... Yes, indeed he did. Which is why I quoted him early in the article. And this kind of comment gets modded "Informative"?
Credit scores represent one limited example of the idea, as do eBay feedback ratings and other examples I cite in the article. What's missing as of now, obviously, are interoperability, universal instant access, and what Slashdot would call "user moderation."
We "could have said all that about the Internet 20 years ago"? You mean 20 years ago I could have seen you, a stranger, across the street, and accessed the net to determine instantly whether we had acquaintances in common, or acquaintances of acquaintances, and whether you owed any of them money and how much, and whether you had stolen away someone's girlfriend, and how often you got into traffic accidents? Boy, that 1985 Internet was really something.
It's clear I "don't understand anything about economics"? I guess to prove that you could have summoned up my school records using the magic 1985 Internet, but what specifically makes you say that now?
I wrote that article, and in it I make exactly that point: It's an incremental process, likely to take place over centuries. But that doesn't mean there's no place for intentional design; after all, the world of finance is filled with countless rules, and they didn't just sprout like grass. Every rule was designed, by a committee or individual or corporation.
Best possible time to plug The Escapist magazine. Yeah, I know, you hate the layout -- but (I speak here as a writer for the site) its journalism stands comparison with "real" magazines.
Sorry, I misspoke. I should have said "cut for length," not for space. The Escapist pays by the word, and so the more they published, the more they would have to pay me. They gave me a target length of 3,000 words, which is presumably what they budgeted for; in the event, the article was nearly 3,600 words.
I wrote that Escapist article. The problem with EA's management of Origin wasn't that EA insisted EA adhere to a schedule, but that EA tried to schedule every game as if it were a sports game. My article ran long and so I had to cut quite a bit for space. One point I wanted to make, but had no room for, was that EA routinely rotates its studio managers on a one-year cycle, which accommodates its successful sports game schedule. For the kinds of games Origin made, though -- games that required several years to realize -- this proved disastrous. A new manager (with his own personal agenda) would arrive late in the year, cancel projects and order layoffs, start a new slate of projects, order new hiring, and then a year would go by and bam! the new manager would arrive and start the cycle all over again.
This is not "EA insisting Origin adhere to a schedule." This is a fundamental disjuncture between the corporate HQ's philosophy and the Origin approach.
This is incorrect, assuming you mean Origin would still be an independent publisher. As I interviewed ex-Originites for the Escapist article, the theme that emerged was that by 1992 Origin definitely had either to find a buyer or go out of business. The company's position as a publisher was unsustainable in the changing market.
It is certainly possible the right buyer (i.e., someone other than EA) might have kept Origin largely intact in body and spirit as a studio, even to this day. But as I describe in the article, EA's internal politics, and its attempt to produce all games the way it produces sports games, made it impossible for them to exploit Origin effectively.
I swear I'm not trolling here, but I think the designer could more instructively have discussed the actual historical reasons hunters killed bison:
I suggest this kind of history is valid for inclusion in a historical game about the Oregon Trail.
"The second pill costs six cents; the first pill costs five hundred million dollars." -- Aaron Sorkin, The West Wing.
I'm sure Intel will be happy to sell you the second processor that rolls off any given production line for $40, as long as you also buy the first one, which costs -- what would it be? -- about $200,000,000 or so?
Doctor Strange is a good character. His backstory is all about redemption, a good theme for both comics and movies. Many Marvel writers have told good stories about Strange over the last four decades. He also fulfills a valuable narrative role in the Marvel universe; he's the Sorcerer Supreme, or at least he was last time I looked.
Shang-Chi had a long run of good stories in the 1970s title Master of Kung Fu. They were interesting for their leavening of philosophy. It wouldn't be at all hard to turn that book into a decent kung fu movie.
The best and most bracing recent analysis I've seen of the Shuttle and its current situation is A Rocket to Nowhere by one Maciej Ceglowski. "The goal cannot be to have a safe space program -- rocket science is going to remain difficult and risky. But we have the right to demand that the space program have some purpose beyond trying to keep its participants alive. NASA needs to take a lesson in courage from its astronauts, and demand either a proper, funded mandate for manned exploration, or close down the program. By NASA's own arguments, the commercial, technological and intellectual allure of manned space exploration are so great that it will not be a hard case to make. But even if the worst happens and the Shuttles are mothballed, with the ISS left abandoned, the loss to science will have been negligible. That is the great tragedy of the current 'return to flight', and the sooner we force the agency to confront its failure, the greater our chances of salvaging a space program worth keeping out of the current mess."
It's interesting and depressing how many Slashdotters posting here think "game design" is the same as "game programming." But then, historically most people have never given a moment's thought to the idea someone actually invented the rules of the games they play.
I know for a fact this is changing, because I keep getting e-mail from elementary and junior-high school students doing assignments from their teachers. They're supposed to write to a game designer and get him to answer X number of questions the teacher has provided. For inscrutable reasons, when you type the exact term "game designer" into Google, my home page shows up on the first page, higher than any other individual designer. (Yeah, I know -- you've never heard of me.) Weird and unjust, but my penance for this fame is that all these kids write to me with their time-wasting questions. So I know at least some people are starting to recognize "game design" as a job, if not yet as a profession. Hope Slashdot follows pretty soon...
Everyone talks about Ed Wood, Jr. being a totally incompetent filmmaker, but that is incorrect. Wood was selectively incompetent, which is far more interesting.
Genuinely incompetent films are incomprehensible; they're so badly written, filmed, lit, recorded, and edited you can't tell what's supposed to be happening moment to moment. They're dull. Ed Wood's films are interesting because he so weirdly mixes okay technical competence -- in the sense that you can follow the storytelling from scene to scene, because he tells it with acceptable narrative cohesion -- with utterly whacked-out, surreally incompetent plotting. He couches nonsensical ideas in the most portentous yet tone-deaf language. He displays a glorious ignorance of taste -- not "bad taste" in the too-conscious John-Waters sense, but a genuine vacuity of any informed sensibility at all.
Ed Wood is, in fact, an interesting filmmaker. This is true. If you've ever sat with an audience watching Glen or Glenda?, they stay all the way through, and the final scene has them cheering. Wood disastrously fails to engage his audience on the emotional level he intended, but he nonetheless engages them. A genuine incompetent couldn't do this.
I think Ed Wood is a telling case study that illuminates what we really mean when we talk about "genius."
Seems like if you can do this with the keratin of a fingernail, you could probably also inscribe information on a single hair. This raises all kinds of ideas for future spy novels -- data smugglers carrying nothing visible, but the hair on their scalp holds all the source code for Microsoft's entire product line....
I guess the irony I intended in my remark was way too subtle.
We have lost, almost completely, the concept of pandering as harmful. In the Divine Comedy, Dante put the panders in the sixth circle of Hell, lower (and hence worse than) than the murderers. Someday a lot of DoubleClick guys will join them...
QuarkVsInDesign.com is an interesting site for desktop publishing professionals, run by one "Pariah S. Burke," that covers the rivalry between the programs. As you can see from the many comments on this March 29th thread, Quark : Postcards From the Edge, the animosity toward Quark has grown pervasive.
My physics professor at the University of Nevada Reno, the late Samuel Goudsmit (best known as co-discoverer of the electron's spin), was technical lead on the ALSOS project immediately after World War II. His team went into Berlin and certain other areas shortly after the Allies captured them, in order to sieze any Nazi nuclear material and atom bomb research. They found lots of stuff, then spent a few months studying it closely.
As described in the Wikipedia article (and in Goudsmit's 1947 book, ALSOS: The failure of German science), the Germans never got even remotely close to developing an A-bomb. Their approach to the physics was fundamentally mistaken and would never have led to anything workable. Good news for civilization, bad news for alternate-history writers and sensationalist journalists, but in any case conclusively settled. Goudsmit was a smart guy and knew his stuff.
I recognize that many/most Slashdotters automatically deduct 50 pts from my perceived IQ when I mention my AOL account -- I guess excellent Karma doesn't compensate -- so if you're one of those, you can tune out the rest of this.
Obviously AOL's spam filter is too aggressive, but it does work. (I get maybe 4-6 spams a day, which must compare favorably to Cmdr Taco.) The problems are, you can't permanently whitelist a single sender without turning your entire inbox whitelist-only, and the filter is damn near untrainable. I've been telling it my invitation-only industry mailing list is okay for, what is it, five years now. Hasn't learned yet.
AOL experimented briefly with a different, user-trainable e-mail client called, I think, Communicator. (It wasn't just a rebranded Netscape Communicator.) Trouble was, it sucked down every single e-mail onto your hard drive before you could start training it, including viruses. Yeah, thanks.
I keep my AOL account because it's been my professional front for 15 years, and because my wife's family is on the account too. Vendor lock-in sucks.
It startled me to see a Gamespot story linking to my own bibliography. This was part of the reporter's detective work in trying to deduce the nature of Warren's current project. I worked for Warren at the Austin, TX office of Looking Glass Studios (then Looking Glass Technologies) in the mid-'90s on a game with the working title "Junction Point." I don't know what Warren's current plans are, but I'm willing to bet he isn't trying to resurrect that game. I expect he chose the name purely for sentimental reasons.
By the way, in case anyone cares, the Gamespot story gets one detail wrong: I didn't work with Warren at TSR. Rather, we worked together at Steve Jackson Games in the mid-'80s, where he was Editor-in-Chief and I was the lowly assistant editor. Warren worked for TSR after leaving SJG, and was involved in AD&D 2nd edition there. I never worked at TSR myself, though I did a lot of freelance work for them.
Wow, this post must date from, what, 2000? Haven't looked at Flash in a while, have you? Every point you raise has been addressed in the last couple of versions.
Flash no longer evil! Update your talking points!
The 1954 novella "The Houses of Iszm" by Jack Vance postulated custom-grown treehouse homes. From Rich Horton's review: