The main obstacle to gaming on the Windows platform is Windows - that is, the amount of memory the operating system soaks up just for being around. There, however, you can just slap on some more memory and you're good to go.
But with Macs, I understand that from a game programmer's perspective, the graphics APIs just aren't as good as DirectX. Can't fix that with a few RAM sticks. I've got my Mac computer dual-booting, so I'd know! Also, they don't sell a box that is really in that "gamer" niche. The top-end iMacs are still a bit too slow to be good gaming machines, and your options for aftermarket upgrades are limited; the pro systems are absurdly expensive and shove more cores down your throat than you really need unless you're doing video editing.
I played through FF4, 5, 6, 7, and 9. I played 4 and 6 a lot, too, and 7 enough to get most of the goodies.
I'll probably get through FFX eventually, I just think it's a good example of a studio substituting spectacle and plot for gameplay, at least in the first few hours.
Economic sensibility is not implied by "clever." You must be thinking of "shrewd." Very clever inventors often die in poverty, or see little for their revolutionary inventions.
My thinking on the do-it-yourself instinct is this: I work my 40 hours a week. What do I do with the rest of it to better myself? If I wanted to do more work, I would have to do some consulting on the side. This would require a significant amount of networking and other energy expenditure on my part to maintain, and while it might be a good long-term career move, in the short-term it would take a lot of time for relatively little money. Plus, I spend my whole day talking business - I hardly want to keep talking about it for hours after 5:00.
On the other hand, I could take up auto repair a hobby and maybe save some money on basic repairs and maintenance. It's meditative and interesting. Plus, I learn something, and I don't have to worry about being cheated by dishonest technicians.
I am really skeptical of any engine improvements for one big reason: HDR/Bloom slows my computer down to a crawl. Yeah, it looks awesome, but I can't justify spending the money to get a system that handle that level of graphical glitz.
You bring up an important point, though: do engine improvements make a game better? No more than special effects improve a movie's plot. In fact, if I had a dime for every time showing off some CGI bullshit actually made a movie's cinematography worse, I'd have about ten bucks thanks to the Star Wars prequel trilogy alone. I'd say that graphical glamor should never be so grandiose that it slows down a game's user interface (if it has one as such), and that, in many cases, cartoonish graphics and fewer frills actually make a game more playable, and thus a better game. Other elements of a "blockbuster" game, such as extensive plot development and cutscenage, are also anti-game in the sense that they distract you from the actual point of the game which is to, uh, play the game. I was playing FFX for the first time earlier this week, and I just couldn't stand it. You take away all the atrocious yammering and soulful gazes, and all you're left with is too little of a fairly banal game.
Of course, the caveat to this is that, in many cases, engine improvements can contribute to sales, and a game can't really sell itself on its gaming merits. And, as Ken Levine pointed out on that talk show he was on recently, politics can lead to business decisions being made for purely b2b-related reasons, and I'm sure it only gets worse when you're a titan of a company like Valve. This isn't too hard for me to imagine:
Valve Exec:... Yeah, so we're not too hot on the whole "Bloom" thing. I mean, it's cool and all, but implementing it properly presents a challenge, and it adds another variable for the level designers and artists to think about, and it's just going to slow down production.
Nvidia Rep: Oh? Really? Gee, that's really disappointing...
Valve Exec: What do you mean?
Nvidia Rep: Oh, I don't know. I mean, you know, if all of the game companies in the world stopped pushing technology, we'd basically be out of business.
Valve Exec: We're not talking about bloom never, just not for this quick episodic release business plan we're having. When we come out with our next major title, it's definitely got bloom.
Nvidia Rep: Yeah, and when's that gonna be? 2010 or 2011 if we take into account your last hit. Look, you're one of the big developers. One of the only big developers. Who's going to do it if you don't? Bethesda? Shit, come on. And we do a lot of nice things for you in terms of features and API support. I mean, I guess we might just have to stop doing those if you're not going to play ball.
Valve Exec: Okay, hang on. *picks up phone* Yeah, hey, you know, I'd really like you to try to get that bloom stuff into Episode 2. What? Yeah, I know it'll delay it, that's fine. But we're just talking a few months, right?
I just looked it up. Pretty funny. I'll quote it for anyone equally uninformed:
An engineer was crossing a road one day, when a frog called out to him and said, "If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess." He bent over, picked up the frog and put it in his pocket. The frog spoke up again and said, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will stay
with you for one week." The engineer took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned it to the pocket. The frog then cried out, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I'll stay with you for one week and do ANYTHING you want." Again, the engineer took the frog out, smiled at it and put it back into his pocket. Finally, the frog asked,
"What is the matter? I've told you I'm a beautiful princess, and that I'll
stay with you for one week and do anything you want. Why won't you kiss
me?" The engineer said, "Look, I'm an engineer. I don't have time for a
girlfriend, but a talking frog, now that's cool."
Yeah, and the superior stability of Linux means her computer will never get infected with adware, viruses, or even slow down on boot time. In fact, it'll never have any problems short of a hard drive crash, motherboard failure, or power supply failure. What good is that? You'll never get to see her again.
The author of that article has apparently never taken a journalism class. Reading that article, I don't know when he said it, why he said it, in what context it appeared, or even whether it was printed or spoken. Furthermore, the author doesn't clarify what Tim means by "stupid" at all, or provide any examples. You could illustrate it with two bullet points:
Tim thinks geeks are stupid
Girl-on-girl action
I have all sorts of things I could say about the subject of women in technology and discrimination, but I just refuse to do it here because of the appalling lack of substance in the article.
Well, there's a question of appropriateness. For flight sims, it's all about the analog stick. For fighting games, you usually want to use the D-Pad because of the precise input sequences. In the case of this game, the use of motion control was not appropriate and was evidently tacked on because of politics. The end result was something that was both incomplete in execution and an inappropriate design choice. Even if you had all the engineers in the world working on it, you couldn't have made it anything but a square peg in a round hole. At least that's what I gather; I haven't actually played it.
By the way, I totally dug his comments about the obtuse plots, long cutscenes and general un-gaminess of practically every Japanese RPG. I was just ranting about that the other day.
Re:Linux is the biggest Linux gaming obstacle
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That depends. If you're making an exclusive game for the PS3, and you are confident that every single PS3 owner in the world will want to buy your game, sure. However, I think for your middle-of-the-bell-curve studio, writing in OpenGL and DirectX makes better business sense. If I were the bean counter in charge and someone said, "Hey, let's write super-special optimized code for the PS3, which is already a pain because of those eight cores, thereby increasing our development costs, so that we can increase sales in our smallest demographic, who have to take out a second mortgage just to buy the console in the first place!" I'd answer with a flat, resounding "No" unless there were incentives, or, to put it more bluntly, bribery from Sony.
You're talking about something which is very interesting and compelling, but which should no longer properly be called an RPG. Interactive movie might be more appropriate. The term "RPG" has come to stand for the system of statistics, attributes and combat which most RPGs have in common, but which is merely a set of rules imposed upon informal "let's pretend" games to give them more gamelike, structured qualities. I don't know what you'd call this.
Oblivion is one of the few modern games that has a right to call itself an RPG. It allows you pretend you're a character in an alternate universe, affording you the a portion of the freedom that you would have in a pen and paper RPG. While not as popular as what you prefer, it is a proper RPG.
I hate going on about terms and how they replace each other, occluding the concepts behind the original term, but here, it's true. Most people associate "RPG" more readily with games which have very shallow role-playing: as much as Doom or GTA.
You know, the Final Fantasy series, while linear, was much more interesting in the 2d era. You had to (gasp) make decisions about the composition of your party, and the characters had (shudder) classes with (scream) specialties. Final Fantasy 7 was just too much of a blockbuster.
FF 6 was the beginning of the end, where you could teach any character any spell. They've pretty much been going in that mold since then in terms of gameplay. What really did the genre in, though, was Final Fantasy Fucking Seven, and its "oh look, we can" full-motion video cutscenes, gameplay-generic characters, obscure, and inscrutable non-plot.
Heh. When I first wrote that out, I included that he usually played Mitsurugi or Ivy, while I preferred Voldo or Astaroth, which would've made it more clear that I was refering to Soul Calibur 2. I decided to cut that information out for the sake of brevity.
Well, yeah, obviously these people you hear about dying are taking it way overboard. I don't think anybody needs to play like that to become very skilled, or even the best of the best. My roommate got as good as he did playing a few hours a day. My work ethic in any area has always been that there's a limit to human endurance. There's a point beyond which more practice isn't going to make you get much better, and a point at which you become tired, and therefore sloppy. It happens with sports, with gaming, with coding, with everything.
In my experience, Asian gamers take it a helluva lot more seriously. I used to play SC2 against my roommate. I just wanted to pick it up and play every once in a while, and learn a few tricks. I could beat almost anybody else on the floor. My roommate, though, his goal was to become a monster. And so we were pretty competitive for a few months, and then I lost interest in improving while he just kept at it. He became nigh-unbeatable. It was pretty much the same deal with respect to CounterStrike and two other Asian guys in the building or Starcraft and another set of people who liked that or whatever else we were playing back then.
As for whether this applies to general work ethic, or sports, or arts, I'm not so sure, but it seems very true of gaming.
Very interesting points about antitrust. I'll have to disagree with the idea that low market share makes the platform totally unattractive, though.
The biggest plus to developing for the Apple platform that I've seen is that few other people develop for it. It's something of a captive audience. A significant number of Mac users play World of Warcraft because it runs on OS X. Also, less competition among suppliers means (if we are to believe basic economics) means higher prices (and by higher I mean higher than free). Furthermore, viruses have made PC users gunshy about trying new software. Many simply will install any software not made by Microsoft or Adobe. Not true of Mac users.
I'll give you "Apple is an unattractive platform for Indian developers," though. 1% is pretty sad.
A friend of mine went on a trip to Ecador recently. The idea was to make water collection tanks for the natives out in the jungle. He's an engineering graduate student, everyone else was in sociology, and they were hippies to the man. Tons of pot. Dirty. White people with dreadlocks. You name a stereotype, they had it.
The trip fell apart because my friend had the perverted idea that he, as an engineer, should tell them how to engineer things. They wanted to decide things like structural soundness democratically. They had a poor work ethic as well: while he'd be trying to teach them how to do something, they'd start massage circles or play frisbee in the middle of the Ecuadorian jungle.
Perhaps you could add other stereotypes in there, such as "Lazy, idealistic college kids," or "sheltered American youth" but it is very tempting for me to say, given my experiences, that a sizable segment of the hippie population is too inept, anti-authority, lazy and anti-knowledge to change anything, up to and including their own underwear.
Many people in what we call "developing nations" do not have personal computers, and use computers in cyber cafes instead. This includes even computer-savvy people. Still a bad idea to buy online, in my opinion, but it transfers the onus of privacy from a cafe owner who you look in the face to some guy in an office somewhere. And as CounterStrike has taught us, it's a lot easier to be a fuckwad to people you can't see or hear.
I think you just proved your parent's point: that other divisions generally do not have the same understanding of how much work is involved in a project like this, and thus cannot accurately allot time, money and manpower.
Darn it, it's true. Even the best of the best can't always support every browser, and my absolute least-favorite thing in the world is account for esoteric browser inconsistencies in Javascript and CSS. I cannot see myself building a "Web 2.0" site for anyone for any reason.
For one, web pages that output HTML with little or no Javascript and which are built in such a way as to need very little browser-tweaking keep me sleeping well at night. Secondly, I don't see that it adds a ton of value in most places. It just makes your back button behavior wierd. I'll admit that eBay's new interface is cool, as are Slashdot and Digg. OkCupid and Facebook, on the other hand, would be just as usable (if not more so) without it, but of course they're doing it to capture the attention of young neophiles. I don't know either way, but my gut says this demographic is not incredibly important to companies like Morgan Stanley either way.
I was speaking only in terms of recreation, which I had thought would be implicit given that the topic was gaming, recreation and socialization, but apparently not. That's probably just personal bias though, because I have a pretty active social life and don't really let my work and play get mixed up. It's also probable that because I work for a pretty small - but still, I assure you, "real" - shop that I don't think about things that other people have to deal with, like office politics, as readily as some others.
To directly address you, of course politics, management and logistics figure into work life. I guess - and thank you for helping me refine my point - what I object to is participating in something that resembles work more than play (and is unpleasant because of the stuff I outlined in the GP post), yet does not confer works of art or craft or contribute to my livelihood. There's a certain satisfaction in simply accomplishing something that's hard and requires a lot of cooperation and teamwork, but I happen to think that it'd be more fun if the structure of the game were more flexible.
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The main obstacle to gaming on the Windows platform is Windows - that is, the amount of memory the operating system soaks up just for being around. There, however, you can just slap on some more memory and you're good to go.
But with Macs, I understand that from a game programmer's perspective, the graphics APIs just aren't as good as DirectX. Can't fix that with a few RAM sticks. I've got my Mac computer dual-booting, so I'd know! Also, they don't sell a box that is really in that "gamer" niche. The top-end iMacs are still a bit too slow to be good gaming machines, and your options for aftermarket upgrades are limited; the pro systems are absurdly expensive and shove more cores down your throat than you really need unless you're doing video editing.
I played through FF4, 5, 6, 7, and 9. I played 4 and 6 a lot, too, and 7 enough to get most of the goodies.
I'll probably get through FFX eventually, I just think it's a good example of a studio substituting spectacle and plot for gameplay, at least in the first few hours.
Economic sensibility is not implied by "clever." You must be thinking of "shrewd." Very clever inventors often die in poverty, or see little for their revolutionary inventions.
My thinking on the do-it-yourself instinct is this: I work my 40 hours a week. What do I do with the rest of it to better myself? If I wanted to do more work, I would have to do some consulting on the side. This would require a significant amount of networking and other energy expenditure on my part to maintain, and while it might be a good long-term career move, in the short-term it would take a lot of time for relatively little money. Plus, I spend my whole day talking business - I hardly want to keep talking about it for hours after 5:00.
On the other hand, I could take up auto repair a hobby and maybe save some money on basic repairs and maintenance. It's meditative and interesting. Plus, I learn something, and I don't have to worry about being cheated by dishonest technicians.
I am really skeptical of any engine improvements for one big reason: HDR/Bloom slows my computer down to a crawl. Yeah, it looks awesome, but I can't justify spending the money to get a system that handle that level of graphical glitz.
You bring up an important point, though: do engine improvements make a game better? No more than special effects improve a movie's plot. In fact, if I had a dime for every time showing off some CGI bullshit actually made a movie's cinematography worse, I'd have about ten bucks thanks to the Star Wars prequel trilogy alone. I'd say that graphical glamor should never be so grandiose that it slows down a game's user interface (if it has one as such), and that, in many cases, cartoonish graphics and fewer frills actually make a game more playable, and thus a better game. Other elements of a "blockbuster" game, such as extensive plot development and cutscenage, are also anti-game in the sense that they distract you from the actual point of the game which is to, uh, play the game. I was playing FFX for the first time earlier this week, and I just couldn't stand it. You take away all the atrocious yammering and soulful gazes, and all you're left with is too little of a fairly banal game.
Of course, the caveat to this is that, in many cases, engine improvements can contribute to sales, and a game can't really sell itself on its gaming merits. And, as Ken Levine pointed out on that talk show he was on recently, politics can lead to business decisions being made for purely b2b-related reasons, and I'm sure it only gets worse when you're a titan of a company like Valve. This isn't too hard for me to imagine:
Valve Exec: ... Yeah, so we're not too hot on the whole "Bloom" thing. I mean, it's cool and all, but implementing it properly presents a challenge, and it adds another variable for the level designers and artists to think about, and it's just going to slow down production.
Nvidia Rep: Oh? Really? Gee, that's really disappointing...
Valve Exec: What do you mean?
Nvidia Rep: Oh, I don't know. I mean, you know, if all of the game companies in the world stopped pushing technology, we'd basically be out of business.
Valve Exec: We're not talking about bloom never, just not for this quick episodic release business plan we're having. When we come out with our next major title, it's definitely got bloom.
Nvidia Rep: Yeah, and when's that gonna be? 2010 or 2011 if we take into account your last hit. Look, you're one of the big developers. One of the only big developers. Who's going to do it if you don't? Bethesda? Shit, come on. And we do a lot of nice things for you in terms of features and API support. I mean, I guess we might just have to stop doing those if you're not going to play ball. Valve Exec: Okay, hang on. *picks up phone* Yeah, hey, you know, I'd really like you to try to get that bloom stuff into Episode 2. What? Yeah, I know it'll delay it, that's fine. But we're just talking a few months, right?
I just looked it up. Pretty funny. I'll quote it for anyone equally uninformed:
An engineer was crossing a road one day, when a frog called out to him and said, "If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess." He bent over, picked up the frog and put it in his pocket. The frog spoke up again and said, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will stay with you for one week." The engineer took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned it to the pocket. The frog then cried out, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I'll stay with you for one week and do ANYTHING you want." Again, the engineer took the frog out, smiled at it and put it back into his pocket. Finally, the frog asked,"What is the matter? I've told you I'm a beautiful princess, and that I'll stay with you for one week and do anything you want. Why won't you kiss me?" The engineer said, "Look, I'm an engineer. I don't have time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog, now that's cool."
Yeah, and the superior stability of Linux means her computer will never get infected with adware, viruses, or even slow down on boot time. In fact, it'll never have any problems short of a hard drive crash, motherboard failure, or power supply failure. What good is that? You'll never get to see her again.
One of my friends always just said, "I like female characters because I don't want to look at a guy's ass all day. Now who's the weirdo, eh?"
And as far as comments and moderation go, Digg's level of discourse is about what you'd expect from an MMORPG.
The author of that article has apparently never taken a journalism class. Reading that article, I don't know when he said it, why he said it, in what context it appeared, or even whether it was printed or spoken. Furthermore, the author doesn't clarify what Tim means by "stupid" at all, or provide any examples. You could illustrate it with two bullet points:
I have all sorts of things I could say about the subject of women in technology and discrimination, but I just refuse to do it here because of the appalling lack of substance in the article.
Well, there's a question of appropriateness. For flight sims, it's all about the analog stick. For fighting games, you usually want to use the D-Pad because of the precise input sequences. In the case of this game, the use of motion control was not appropriate and was evidently tacked on because of politics. The end result was something that was both incomplete in execution and an inappropriate design choice. Even if you had all the engineers in the world working on it, you couldn't have made it anything but a square peg in a round hole. At least that's what I gather; I haven't actually played it.
By the way, I totally dug his comments about the obtuse plots, long cutscenes and general un-gaminess of practically every Japanese RPG. I was just ranting about that the other day.
That depends. If you're making an exclusive game for the PS3, and you are confident that every single PS3 owner in the world will want to buy your game, sure. However, I think for your middle-of-the-bell-curve studio, writing in OpenGL and DirectX makes better business sense. If I were the bean counter in charge and someone said, "Hey, let's write super-special optimized code for the PS3, which is already a pain because of those eight cores, thereby increasing our development costs, so that we can increase sales in our smallest demographic, who have to take out a second mortgage just to buy the console in the first place!" I'd answer with a flat, resounding "No" unless there were incentives, or, to put it more bluntly, bribery from Sony.
You're talking about something which is very interesting and compelling, but which should no longer properly be called an RPG. Interactive movie might be more appropriate. The term "RPG" has come to stand for the system of statistics, attributes and combat which most RPGs have in common, but which is merely a set of rules imposed upon informal "let's pretend" games to give them more gamelike, structured qualities. I don't know what you'd call this.
Oblivion is one of the few modern games that has a right to call itself an RPG. It allows you pretend you're a character in an alternate universe, affording you the a portion of the freedom that you would have in a pen and paper RPG. While not as popular as what you prefer, it is a proper RPG.
I hate going on about terms and how they replace each other, occluding the concepts behind the original term, but here, it's true. Most people associate "RPG" more readily with games which have very shallow role-playing: as much as Doom or GTA.
You know, the Final Fantasy series, while linear, was much more interesting in the 2d era. You had to (gasp) make decisions about the composition of your party, and the characters had (shudder) classes with (scream) specialties. Final Fantasy 7 was just too much of a blockbuster.
FF 6 was the beginning of the end, where you could teach any character any spell. They've pretty much been going in that mold since then in terms of gameplay. What really did the genre in, though, was Final Fantasy Fucking Seven, and its "oh look, we can" full-motion video cutscenes, gameplay-generic characters, obscure, and inscrutable non-plot.
Heh. When I first wrote that out, I included that he usually played Mitsurugi or Ivy, while I preferred Voldo or Astaroth, which would've made it more clear that I was refering to Soul Calibur 2. I decided to cut that information out for the sake of brevity.
Well, yeah, obviously these people you hear about dying are taking it way overboard. I don't think anybody needs to play like that to become very skilled, or even the best of the best. My roommate got as good as he did playing a few hours a day. My work ethic in any area has always been that there's a limit to human endurance. There's a point beyond which more practice isn't going to make you get much better, and a point at which you become tired, and therefore sloppy. It happens with sports, with gaming, with coding, with everything.
In my experience, Asian gamers take it a helluva lot more seriously. I used to play SC2 against my roommate. I just wanted to pick it up and play every once in a while, and learn a few tricks. I could beat almost anybody else on the floor. My roommate, though, his goal was to become a monster. And so we were pretty competitive for a few months, and then I lost interest in improving while he just kept at it. He became nigh-unbeatable. It was pretty much the same deal with respect to CounterStrike and two other Asian guys in the building or Starcraft and another set of people who liked that or whatever else we were playing back then.
As for whether this applies to general work ethic, or sports, or arts, I'm not so sure, but it seems very true of gaming.
The last bit sorta reminds you of Dragon Ball Z, doesn't it?
Very interesting points about antitrust. I'll have to disagree with the idea that low market share makes the platform totally unattractive, though.
The biggest plus to developing for the Apple platform that I've seen is that few other people develop for it. It's something of a captive audience. A significant number of Mac users play World of Warcraft because it runs on OS X. Also, less competition among suppliers means (if we are to believe basic economics) means higher prices (and by higher I mean higher than free). Furthermore, viruses have made PC users gunshy about trying new software. Many simply will install any software not made by Microsoft or Adobe. Not true of Mac users.
I'll give you "Apple is an unattractive platform for Indian developers," though. 1% is pretty sad.
A friend of mine went on a trip to Ecador recently. The idea was to make water collection tanks for the natives out in the jungle. He's an engineering graduate student, everyone else was in sociology, and they were hippies to the man. Tons of pot. Dirty. White people with dreadlocks. You name a stereotype, they had it.
The trip fell apart because my friend had the perverted idea that he, as an engineer, should tell them how to engineer things. They wanted to decide things like structural soundness democratically. They had a poor work ethic as well: while he'd be trying to teach them how to do something, they'd start massage circles or play frisbee in the middle of the Ecuadorian jungle.
Perhaps you could add other stereotypes in there, such as "Lazy, idealistic college kids," or "sheltered American youth" but it is very tempting for me to say, given my experiences, that a sizable segment of the hippie population is too inept, anti-authority, lazy and anti-knowledge to change anything, up to and including their own underwear.
It's still the closest thing to a real sandbox out there that I've seen.
I would've liked to see TCP/IP up there.
Many people in what we call "developing nations" do not have personal computers, and use computers in cyber cafes instead. This includes even computer-savvy people. Still a bad idea to buy online, in my opinion, but it transfers the onus of privacy from a cafe owner who you look in the face to some guy in an office somewhere. And as CounterStrike has taught us, it's a lot easier to be a fuckwad to people you can't see or hear.
I think you just proved your parent's point: that other divisions generally do not have the same understanding of how much work is involved in a project like this, and thus cannot accurately allot time, money and manpower.
Darn it, it's true. Even the best of the best can't always support every browser, and my absolute least-favorite thing in the world is account for esoteric browser inconsistencies in Javascript and CSS. I cannot see myself building a "Web 2.0" site for anyone for any reason.
For one, web pages that output HTML with little or no Javascript and which are built in such a way as to need very little browser-tweaking keep me sleeping well at night. Secondly, I don't see that it adds a ton of value in most places. It just makes your back button behavior wierd. I'll admit that eBay's new interface is cool, as are Slashdot and Digg. OkCupid and Facebook, on the other hand, would be just as usable (if not more so) without it, but of course they're doing it to capture the attention of young neophiles. I don't know either way, but my gut says this demographic is not incredibly important to companies like Morgan Stanley either way.
I was speaking only in terms of recreation, which I had thought would be implicit given that the topic was gaming, recreation and socialization, but apparently not. That's probably just personal bias though, because I have a pretty active social life and don't really let my work and play get mixed up. It's also probable that because I work for a pretty small - but still, I assure you, "real" - shop that I don't think about things that other people have to deal with, like office politics, as readily as some others.
To directly address you, of course politics, management and logistics figure into work life. I guess - and thank you for helping me refine my point - what I object to is participating in something that resembles work more than play (and is unpleasant because of the stuff I outlined in the GP post), yet does not confer works of art or craft or contribute to my livelihood. There's a certain satisfaction in simply accomplishing something that's hard and requires a lot of cooperation and teamwork, but I happen to think that it'd be more fun if the structure of the game were more flexible.