Warren Spector is a very smart man, with many fine accomplishments to his credit. I'm looking forward to his next projects quite eagerly.
That said, his involvement with the first Ultima Underworld game was quite small (Origin's liaison with Looking Glass), and his involvement with Thief, while not actually nil, was extremely close to it. He had no involvement with Thief 2 at all. And, of course, there were a lot of other people who helped make all these projects happen.
Warren's job includes talking to the press, so his name gets out there a lot, but if you actually pay attention to what he *says*, he's always trying to spread the credit around, because he *knows* that he tends to get way more than he deserves. Warren is indeed a true game innovator. But singling him out in this way is both misleading, and an insult to the dozens of other brilliant people who contributed to those games.
Warren is certainly due a lot of credit. But you do him (and other readers) a disservice if you try and give him so much more credit than he is due.
{This is an edited version of a post I've made before -- and doubtless will again.)
As a lone programmer, I say not. How many even slightly successful games these days are produced by single programmers or even small teams? Sure, there are a few very successful examples but they're all lo-fi or Shockwave games.. and not the typical 'computer games' we're used to.
What about RollerCoaster Tycoon? Largely the work of a single programmer (Chris Sawyer). Hasn't dropped off the Top Ten Bestseller lists since its release, in 1999. That's rather more than "slightly" successful.
PC Gamer does "Top 50 Games Ever" lists about once a year. I think 2-3 years ago, Tie Fighter was picked as #1. Earlier, Jedi Knight had been a #1 pick.
False dichotomy. These people aren't neurologists, so they aren't really equipped to help blind people actually see again. On the other hand, they *do* know something about game coding/design, and decided to use what skills they have to help the blind. What's wrong with that?
Depends on your definition of "functional". It works, and it's fun for some people, but... If sighted people are allowed to turn on the visual interface, they walk all over the blinks. Contrariwise, if they're *not* allowed to turn on the visual interface, the blinks tend to walk all over them. This difficulty in creating a level playing field was why they decided to put the project aside (at least for the time being). I really hope they go back to it someday, and solve these problems...
"how much AI has been programmed into this game for the blind players?"
None. I've played it. All players *emit* noises. You aim yourself so that the sound is balanced in your left and right ears, and you fire. There's some learning curve there, but it's not much worse then the first time you had to learn mouselook.
(Of course, the primary weapons that they had in their maps were Shotguns, Rocket Launchers, and the chainsaw, none of which need to be very precisely targeted.)
From the article: "One of the greatest moments came this winter when the team was showing off its sound-only version of Quake to other game designers. Keenan, whose blindness started them on their quest, took on the other game designers, all old hands at Quake. ''Tim,'' said Spitzer with a laugh, ''just slaughtered them.''"
I was at that meeting, and brought along my blind, non-gamer (then) wife. Although Tim was (naturally) much better than her, she did manage to kill him once. The whole way home, she kept saying "I *get* it now! Shooting things is *fun*!"
Now she's a gamer herself, and an official tester for ZForm:-)
McDonald's managed to successfully convine the media and general public that this case was "frivolous" -- but they didn't convine the judge or the jury, nor anyone else in possession of all the facts.
"McFact No. 1: For years, McDonald's had known they had a problem with the way they make their coffee - that their coffee was served much hotter (at least 20 degrees more so) than at other restaurants.
McFact No. 2: McDonald's knew its coffee sometimes caused serious injuries - more than 700 incidents of scalding coffee burns in the past decade have been settled by the Corporation - and yet they never so much as consulted a burn expert regarding the issue."
Big Evil Corporations *love* the idea of "frivolous lawsuits" -- because lawsuits are one of the only ways we can keep them in line.
The one feature I want that I *haven't* currently got is a loud-enough beep. I originally started using PDAs primarily in order to remind myself of appointments with a loud beep. My Handspring Visor, in its protective case inside my pocket, isn't loud enough to be noticed over almost any ambient noise. I want louder beeps!
Are Authors Abused by Used? is an article by M.J. Rose up on Wired.com that means that I am quoted on the front page of Wired.com... although I'm quoted on the front page as "An Author" (presumably on the basis that my name wouldn't mean anything to Wired readers)...
Seeing that only that one quote makes it into the article, here's the full text of my reply to M.J. Rose's e-mail asking whether or not I thought that authors were being abused by used booksellers...
Well, bear in mind that the background I come from is that of comics, where a trade in back issues is part of the terrain. When Sandman #1 was trading for $100 a copy, I saw none of that, and had long since assumed that the trade in old books and comics went with the territory, and was a good thing in the long run: if someone reads a book of mine in paperback, or borrows it from a friend, or gets it for half-price on a book-trading site or in a store where they sell second-hand paperbacks along with aquariums, pet-food and vacuum-cleaner parts, or picks it up in a battered hardback from a remainder table, they're finding out whether or not they like what I write. And if they do then one day, if they can afford it, they'll be lining up to buy a new hardback, or a new paperback.
Lord knows, most of the books I bought in my teens were bought second hand. Sometimes they smelled kind of weird, but it was the only way I was going to read old Sheckley or Lafferty or Peter O' Donnell.
Books, like magazines, have pass-along rates. They don't come with single-user software licenses. I think this is a good thing. If I read a book and like it, I'll lend it to you and hope you give it back. (GOOD OMENS has probably sold a couple of million copies by now, internationally, but its pass-along rate is tens of times that, judging by the copies people bring to signings, which have been lent to everyone they know, are held together with tape and dried soup, and have obviously been dropped into the bath at some point.)
Obviously, it makes me uncomfortable when I see Amazon erroneously listing books that are in print as out of print and sending people to used book dealers to buy them, just as it makes me uncomfortable when I see people on E-Bay paying $75 for my spoken word double CD "Warning Contains Language", which they could get from DreamHaven new for less than half that. There's not a lot one can do about these things, other than write to publishers telling them to ask Amazon to update their database.
This is probably much more than you wanted. Still, to make it explicit: I don't regard every second-hand book sold as a dollar taken from my mouth. I've already been paid for that book at some point. I regard second-hand sales as things that make future readers.
Many of the early Atari Easter Eggs (such as the Adventure dot) were created by the programmers as ways of getting credit. Warren Robinette received no other credit for his work on Adventure besides what he himself put in as an Easter Egg.
Similarly, in the world of film, the Mouse Mania short that Mike Jittlov did for Disney has a number of "Easter Eggs" in it, giving credit to the various people who helped him on the project (and whom Disney wouldn't officially credit).
Waren Spector is a very smart man, with many fine accomplishments to his credit. I'm not sure I'd go so far as "genius", but I'll grant that he has a good eye for successful games. I'm looking forward to his next projects quite eagerly.
That said, his involvement with the first Ultima Underworld game was quite small (Origin's liaison with Looking Glass), and his involvement with Thief, while not actually nil, was extremely close to it. And, of course, there were a lot of other people who helped make all these projects happen.
Warren's job includes talking to the press, so his name gets out there a lot, but if you actually pay attention to what he *says*, he's always trying to spread the credit around, because he *knows* that he tends to get way more than he deserves. To call Warren "THE genius behind" [emphasis mine] the games he worked on is both inaccurate, and an insult to the dozens of other brilliant people who contributed to those games.
Warren is certainly due a lot of credit. But you do him (and other readers) a disservice if you try and give him so much more credit than he is due.
[This is what I sent to the author after reading his article]
While I agree that it would be beneficial for Windows to implement a system such as the one you suggest, and while I agree that generally Microsoft qualifies as The Evil Empire, I do disagree with one of the points of your article. You say "The reason Microsoft has never done this isn't technical; it's pure business hardball cowering behind the camouflage of a technicality." Actually, I would claim that it's neither a technical nor a business reason. I think it's simple inertia. It's a relic from much earlier versions of Windows, and no more arcane than most of the functionality available in those days. While it's possible that they made a conscious business choice to leave it as is for monopolistic reasons, it doesn't strike me as terribly likely. For people who've been using Windows a long time (like me, and, presumably, like the people at Microsoft), the file associations menu *is* in an obvious place. I'll grant your points that a new user would have trouble finding it, and that that's a problem deserving of being fixed. But I think that trying to paint this (non-)action by MS as being an act of deliberate market manipulation is misguided, especially when there are so many *provable* examples of such behavior out there.
There is a definate client side memory leak. The client likes to use all 512MB's of ram in my box over the course of about two hours, then it swaps to disk like crazy and the game freezes, crashes to desktop and then you wait 5 minutes for the OS to release the memory. Now, this isn't just my experience, I've witnessed this process on two of my friends computers also, we all have differant hardware, and differant software configs yet we all have the same problem. The bigger problem with this is that Funcom's public message from the devs yesterday stated that they don't see a memory leak. If you your going to use your player base as beta testers you should probably listen to them, which doesn't seem to be happening.
Speaking as both a gamer and as someone in the game industry who has worked in QA: If they say they don't see a leak, then they probably don't. Even if the problem is very common among your circle, that doesn't mean that it's easy for the dev team to reproduce, and without reproducing it, it's hard to find exactly where the problem is. When I was in QA, I sometimes spent several days of work trying to reproduce particularly elusive problems. Even with detailed user reports of how they can reproduce the problem, there's no guarantee that it will happen on the machine that the company tries to reproduce it on. Sadly, it's just not practical to send a programmer with a debug kit over to actual users' houses to find that sort of problem.
That said, there are professional debugging tools and methods which should have been able to find and/or prevent these problems. Like all the big MMORPGs to date, AO has shipped in what I would call an un-shippable state.
Slashdot Mirror
Eric Brosius is *definitely* on board. Don't know what we'd do without him, frankly.
Warren Spector is a very smart man, with many fine accomplishments to his credit. I'm looking forward to his next projects quite eagerly.
That said, his involvement with the first Ultima Underworld game was quite small (Origin's liaison with Looking Glass), and his involvement with Thief, while not actually nil, was extremely close to it. He had no involvement with Thief 2 at all. And, of course, there were a lot of other people who helped make all these projects happen.
Warren's job includes talking to the press, so his name gets out there a lot, but if you actually pay attention to what he *says*, he's always trying to spread the credit around, because he *knows* that he tends to get way more than he deserves. Warren is indeed a true game innovator. But singling him out in this way is both misleading, and an insult to the dozens of other brilliant people who contributed to those games.
Warren is certainly due a lot of credit. But you do him (and other readers) a disservice if you try and give him so much more credit than he is due.
{This is an edited version of a post I've made before -- and doubtless will again.)
What about RollerCoaster Tycoon? Largely the work of a single programmer (Chris Sawyer). Hasn't dropped off the Top Ten Bestseller lists since its release, in 1999. That's rather more than "slightly" successful.
PC Gamer does "Top 50 Games Ever" lists about once a year. I think 2-3 years ago, Tie Fighter was picked as #1. Earlier, Jedi Knight had been a #1 pick.
False dichotomy. These people aren't neurologists, so they aren't really equipped to help blind people actually see again. On the other hand, they *do* know something about game coding/design, and decided to use what skills they have to help the blind. What's wrong with that?
Depends on your definition of "functional". It works, and it's fun for some people, but... If sighted people are allowed to turn on the visual interface, they walk all over the blinks. Contrariwise, if they're *not* allowed to turn on the visual interface, the blinks tend to walk all over them. This difficulty in creating a level playing field was why they decided to put the project aside (at least for the time being). I really hope they go back to it someday, and solve these problems...
"how much AI has been programmed into this game for the blind players?"
None. I've played it. All players *emit* noises. You aim yourself so that the sound is balanced in your left and right ears, and you fire. There's some learning curve there, but it's not much worse then the first time you had to learn mouselook.
(Of course, the primary weapons that they had in their maps were Shotguns, Rocket Launchers, and the chainsaw, none of which need to be very precisely targeted.)
From the article: "One of the greatest moments came this winter when the team was showing off its sound-only version of Quake to other game designers. Keenan, whose blindness started them on their quest, took on the other game designers, all old hands at Quake. ''Tim,'' said Spitzer with a laugh, ''just slaughtered them.''"
:-)
I was at that meeting, and brought along my blind, non-gamer (then) wife. Although Tim was (naturally) much better than her, she did manage to kill him once. The whole way home, she kept saying "I *get* it now! Shooting things is *fun*!"
Now she's a gamer herself, and an official tester for ZForm
McFacts abut the McDonalds Coffee Lawsuit is a good summary, but any google search will find you plenty more citations.
Big Evil Corporations *love* the idea of "frivolous lawsuits" -- because lawsuits are one of the only ways we can keep them in line.
The one feature I want that I *haven't* currently got is a loud-enough beep. I originally started using PDAs primarily in order to remind myself of appointments with a loud beep. My Handspring Visor, in its protective case inside my pocket, isn't loud enough to be noticed over almost any ambient noise. I want louder beeps!
(Or maybe vibration, like cell phones...)
Tuesday, March 19, 2002
Many of the early Atari Easter Eggs (such as the Adventure dot) were created by the programmers as ways of getting credit. Warren Robinette received no other credit for his work on Adventure besides what he himself put in as an Easter Egg.
Similarly, in the world of film, the Mouse Mania short that Mike Jittlov did for Disney has a number of "Easter Eggs" in it, giving credit to the various people who helped him on the project (and whom Disney wouldn't officially credit).
Waren Spector is a very smart man, with many fine accomplishments to his credit. I'm not sure I'd go so far as "genius", but I'll grant that he has a good eye for successful games. I'm looking forward to his next projects quite eagerly.
That said, his involvement with the first Ultima Underworld game was quite small (Origin's liaison with Looking Glass), and his involvement with Thief, while not actually nil, was extremely close to it. And, of course, there were a lot of other people who helped make all these projects happen.
Warren's job includes talking to the press, so his name gets out there a lot, but if you actually pay attention to what he *says*, he's always trying to spread the credit around, because he *knows* that he tends to get way more than he deserves. To call Warren "THE genius behind" [emphasis mine] the games he worked on is both inaccurate, and an insult to the dozens of other brilliant people who contributed to those games.
Warren is certainly due a lot of credit. But you do him (and other readers) a disservice if you try and give him so much more credit than he is due.
[This is what I sent to the author after reading his article]
While I agree that it would be beneficial for Windows to implement a system such as the one you suggest, and while I agree that generally Microsoft qualifies as The Evil Empire, I do disagree with one of the points of your article. You say "The reason Microsoft has never done this isn't technical; it's pure business hardball cowering behind the camouflage of a technicality." Actually, I would claim that it's neither a technical nor a business reason. I think it's simple inertia. It's a relic from much earlier versions of Windows, and no more arcane than most of the functionality available in those days. While it's possible that they made a conscious business choice to leave it as is for monopolistic reasons, it doesn't strike me as terribly likely. For people who've been using Windows a long time (like me, and, presumably, like the people at Microsoft), the file associations menu *is* in an obvious place. I'll grant your points that a new user would have trouble finding it, and that that's a problem deserving of being fixed. But I think that trying to paint this (non-)action by MS as being an act of deliberate market manipulation is misguided, especially when there are so many *provable* examples of such behavior out there.
There is a definate client side memory leak. The client likes to use all 512MB's of ram in my box over the course of about two hours, then it swaps to disk like crazy and the game freezes, crashes to desktop and then you wait 5 minutes for the OS to release the memory. Now, this isn't just my experience, I've witnessed this process on two of my friends computers also, we all have differant hardware, and differant software configs yet we all have the same problem. The bigger problem with this is that Funcom's public message from the devs yesterday stated that they don't see a memory leak. If you your going to use your player base as beta testers you should probably listen to them, which doesn't seem to be happening. Speaking as both a gamer and as someone in the game industry who has worked in QA: If they say they don't see a leak, then they probably don't. Even if the problem is very common among your circle, that doesn't mean that it's easy for the dev team to reproduce, and without reproducing it, it's hard to find exactly where the problem is. When I was in QA, I sometimes spent several days of work trying to reproduce particularly elusive problems. Even with detailed user reports of how they can reproduce the problem, there's no guarantee that it will happen on the machine that the company tries to reproduce it on. Sadly, it's just not practical to send a programmer with a debug kit over to actual users' houses to find that sort of problem. That said, there are professional debugging tools and methods which should have been able to find and/or prevent these problems. Like all the big MMORPGs to date, AO has shipped in what I would call an un-shippable state.