There are many more reasons than just the desire to enhance a game's mass market appeal which drive up development costs.
1. Top-Down Decision Making When the game company is large, and especially if they're publicly traded, the things that happen on the front lines are planned and defined by top-level decisions like "We need to clear X revenue in Q3 of this next fiscal year" or "We need a product for the 8-13 year old demographic in WalMart in November" or "We need to develop a game which includes themes X Y and Z because they are popular right now" or "We have this license or technology, and even though the game will suck, it will sell enough copies to justify making another game with it."
None of these decisions are made with game quality, story, depth, or innovation in mind. They are business decisions which result in a cascade of semi-creative decisions being made down the line until finally the game is done. But those creative decisions are all beholden to the one great decision in the sky that started the development process. The people actually doing the work usually have limited control over the details, as often the content, themes, and "points to hit" are defined by market research or shareholders or other stuff that has nothing to do with whether games are fun or innovative.
What this does is create a process that just has money and hype as inputs, a pre-defined product as an output, but has no good feedback mechanism for the people doing the work to steer the process. The people at the top will assign X number of warm bodies to work on this project with a certain deadline, and come hell or high water, something will be released then. Nothing about the process is agile, money and time are constantly wasted. The brain is disconnected from the body, and even if it were connected, they wouldn't speak the same language. Corporate doesn't understand design or development, they just know that history suggests they will get more money back than they spend if these people do their job and follow the plan.
2. Staffing and Technology If you're targeting WalMart, or volumes on similar scales, you need large teams. The smallest team I've ever developed a retail video game on was still around 10-15 engineers, around 5 designers and producers, a dozen artists and modelers, a few sound and music people, plus the managers and development directors overseeing the people and technology on the project. All these people need full workstations, usually with multiple monitors. The artists need tablets. The engineers need console development kits from Sony or Nintendo which are usually pricey as shit. Everybody needs some IT support, artists need tool and pipeline support, engineers need build/release management support, and then the entire project needs to have a full QA/Testing staff with their own retinue of workstations, tools, procedures, and support roles.
You can make smaller games, but you really need to have brilliant and multi-talented people in every position as your team shrinks, or else you just won't have the bandwidth or knowledge to deal with the problems of game development. It's still possible to find new ideas that can be quickly and simply shaped into an amazing game, but it's getting harder and harder to do that with single digit numbers of employees, and those simple but potent ideas are few and far between.
Even if you do find a small and talented group of people to develop a visionary game, executing that plan properly in an environment dominated by multinational conglomerates and 8-figure budgets is very tough. It's a competitive ecosystem. Even if you have a simple concept, so much is required of software these days. It needs to be fast, stable, socially connected, interactive, and well produced. There should be attention to detail in localization, testing, and distribution. There should be community and customer interaction from the developer(s)/publisher and good support for when things go wrong. Sometimes you can get away without many of these things, but the
I believe you touched on part of the core issue, that apropos of nothing, the average citizen's opinion on the average news story is not worth printing. The trick then, as part of a comment/moderation system, is to put some purpose or function behind it that is more than just airing a personal opinion.
What if a comment/user feedback system was built in to the news article publishing system? What if users could submit corrections, related stories, updates, and other valuable pieces of information that an editor, moderator, or AI could then integrate into the article itself (or somewhere above the fold of general comments)?
This doesn't in theory solve the problem of requiring skilled moderation, but it changes the name of the game from "say anything you want" to "say something productive in a specific format".
You could also combine this with features like thumbs up/down buttons or less personalized ways of expressing a general opinion (similar to the scoring of posts here)... What if below each article it just had tallies of how many readers found the article (Interesting | Insightful | Biased | Incorrect | Noteworthy)... then people can make their opinion known without words that nobody wants to read.
Interesting factoid. I've got some LeGuin on my shelf waiting to be read, but haven't started yet. Must finish my Martin first, damnit! Not enough time!
As someone who actually paid money for the full Anonymizer service, I'm quite disappointed with the web interface going away and I have missed it dearly. The anonproxy.exe POS that they use crashes pretty much daily for me, something the web proxy never did. I'm upset that I've paid money for a service that lost a significant amount of its value after I purchased it.
Saying "use this standard you're not familiar with and none of your tools or partners are set up to handle" is a lot different than saying "yeah, we support what you already use"
Not everyone is deploying systems from the ground up without any legacy dependencies or integration requirements.
This type of communications device was described well and used to good effect in Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" series. He calls the device the "ansible" and it operates by sending messages through the "philotic web," an analogue to a field of quantum entities capable of entanglement.
Not every company uses computers solely for data entry. Some jobs in the tech industry actually require people to read media files on their work PCs. What if you need to share data with colleagues? Download voicemail messages? Watch video captures of software bugs occurring? At my job all our bugs come in with WMV files attached. If I couldn't view those videos, it would significantly impede my ability to do my job.
Thank you for bringing up the red herring issue. I was just telling a friend this; in order to refine the hydrogen for the fuel cells, a factory has to burn coal to make energy to refine hydrogen so all YOU get out of it when you burn it is water. But there's waste elsewhere and more energy gets burned refining it than you can produce by burning it. It's very inefficient and I wish we didn't live in an oil cartel run world where real efficiency in energy production, storage, and distribution aren't completely laughed at.
The first time I met Will Wright it was at a company picnic when he had just started pre-production on Spore. He sat around for at least a half hour just firing off his ideas about the game, and from just that one conversation I'm convinced that he won't try to release a game that falls significantly short of his vision. Of course the Spore team is in a different office now so I have no real idea of what their current progress is like, but unless EA corporate is unnecessarily rushing them, I'm confident Will will deliver a great game.
Yep. I used to work for a company that did automatic form filling software, and when we were testing some forms, we found all sorts of sites with vulnerabilities like that. I think we placed one order for a pair of $80 sunglasses and put 13 cents as the price:).
Similarly, I used to go to the game/chat site Uproar.com and fuck with newbies just cause it's fun. All their system moderators have Uproar in their name (like "UproarJane"), and the form that asks for your username filters out Uproar... but the second form in the process just keeps the name in a hidden field and doesn't do any more checking on it:)... Needless to say it was fun talking shit to people as a moderator:)
I think you're all missing the point of that chick. She looks no older than fifteen to me. Did you see the BRACES????
Bottom line, this chick's JAILBAIT. That's why it says "Can't Touch This" right next to her! Touch Aimster's security and you go to jail for violating the DCMA. Touch that chick and you go to jail for statutory rape.
Unless, like half the damn people on this site, you're under 15. In that case, go for it:)
The South Park movie can be viewed as the turning point in American history where children were no longer allowed to just walk in to see an R rated movie in a theater. I never had a problem seeing R rated movies as a child. I remember walking into Pulp Fiction when I was 13 or 14, no problem. I got asked how old I was (16) when I went to see Private Parts (I said 18:). However, South Park pissed everybody off.
I even remember JonKatz making a big stink about it and getting a theater manager really pissed off at him. After South Park was released I found myself (then over 18) being ID'd regularly for seeing R-rated movies that have possible youth appeal (American Pie was the first one I was ID'd for).
Anyway, I'm just saying it was the public reaction to the fact that children could possibly watch the South Park movie that really made people start to enforce the ratings.
Dear Lord, please let this signal a new transition, from utterly pointless First Posts containing grits and portmans and such assorted nonsense, to first posts that at least reference a phenomenon of actual humorous value.
Jesus, JonKatz must've dug his fat winnie-the-pooh head into the honey jar full of speed, cause this is the sixth typical bloated Katz-rant he's posted in just ten days. That means that it takes him less than two days to spew out and spuriously edit all this bullshit.
I just wish he'd spend ten days on ONE story that's at least twice as good and ten times as short. Learn to write like Taco, Katz. You're a better speller than he is, but he lacks the curse of verbosity that you have.
Hey now, zsnes is the bomb. I haven't paid attention in a while, but I remember back in the day it was the only competent snes emulator. Mad props to my old school [od] homie _demo_.
It's hardly as one-sided as you make it out to be. In fact, I see it as not being one-sided at all. A good sign that a community is working is that views are expressed and respected regardless of which specific side those views come from or seem to favor. Just because it's microsoft doesn't mean it's worthless. And Linux isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, so just because someone is critical of Linux doesn't make their views unfounded.
My favorite variation on the classic Konami code was with the Gradius series. In LifeForce/Gradius, up up down down left right left right b a start gave you something like 15 lives if I remember correctly. But when Gradius III for the super nintendo came out, they changed it so that the extra lives code was up up down down L-button R-button L-button R-button B A start. The old code killed you.:)
I do listen. And I do learn. But that doesn't mean that I'll sit idly by when someone insists that it's impossible for someone under 20 to be intelligent.
I am 19, and I have 4 solid years of computer programming and web design experience behind me. That's more than many people I know in their 20's. I've been working full time since I was 15 and graduated high school. I am the youngest member of my team where I work, and also the one with the largest skillset.
Given, I am probably the exception to the rule, however it does go to show that your "under 20 == idiot" theory has its flaws. Yes I'll be smarter when I'm 40, but that in no way means I'm an idiot now.
As Hagbard Celine says, "True communication is possible only between equals." See The SNAFU principle.
If you are of a similar age to your superiors, especially if you are both young, you can communcate better because you feel like you are peers. I worked for a startup of 20-somethings where I regularly called the founder an asshole and vice versa, because we got along well.
Slashdot Mirror
Aptana is a bloated piece of sluggishness unsuitable for development by those not in a Coma.
There are many more reasons than just the desire to enhance a game's mass market appeal which drive up development costs.
1. Top-Down Decision Making
When the game company is large, and especially if they're publicly traded, the things that happen on the front lines are planned and defined by top-level decisions like "We need to clear X revenue in Q3 of this next fiscal year" or "We need a product for the 8-13 year old demographic in WalMart in November" or "We need to develop a game which includes themes X Y and Z because they are popular right now" or "We have this license or technology, and even though the game will suck, it will sell enough copies to justify making another game with it."
None of these decisions are made with game quality, story, depth, or innovation in mind. They are business decisions which result in a cascade of semi-creative decisions being made down the line until finally the game is done. But those creative decisions are all beholden to the one great decision in the sky that started the development process. The people actually doing the work usually have limited control over the details, as often the content, themes, and "points to hit" are defined by market research or shareholders or other stuff that has nothing to do with whether games are fun or innovative.
What this does is create a process that just has money and hype as inputs, a pre-defined product as an output, but has no good feedback mechanism for the people doing the work to steer the process. The people at the top will assign X number of warm bodies to work on this project with a certain deadline, and come hell or high water, something will be released then. Nothing about the process is agile, money and time are constantly wasted. The brain is disconnected from the body, and even if it were connected, they wouldn't speak the same language. Corporate doesn't understand design or development, they just know that history suggests they will get more money back than they spend if these people do their job and follow the plan.
2. Staffing and Technology
If you're targeting WalMart, or volumes on similar scales, you need large teams. The smallest team I've ever developed a retail video game on was still around 10-15 engineers, around 5 designers and producers, a dozen artists and modelers, a few sound and music people, plus the managers and development directors overseeing the people and technology on the project. All these people need full workstations, usually with multiple monitors. The artists need tablets. The engineers need console development kits from Sony or Nintendo which are usually pricey as shit. Everybody needs some IT support, artists need tool and pipeline support, engineers need build/release management support, and then the entire project needs to have a full QA/Testing staff with their own retinue of workstations, tools, procedures, and support roles.
You can make smaller games, but you really need to have brilliant and multi-talented people in every position as your team shrinks, or else you just won't have the bandwidth or knowledge to deal with the problems of game development. It's still possible to find new ideas that can be quickly and simply shaped into an amazing game, but it's getting harder and harder to do that with single digit numbers of employees, and those simple but potent ideas are few and far between.
Even if you do find a small and talented group of people to develop a visionary game, executing that plan properly in an environment dominated by multinational conglomerates and 8-figure budgets is very tough. It's a competitive ecosystem. Even if you have a simple concept, so much is required of software these days. It needs to be fast, stable, socially connected, interactive, and well produced. There should be attention to detail in localization, testing, and distribution. There should be community and customer interaction from the developer(s)/publisher and good support for when things go wrong. Sometimes you can get away without many of these things, but the
My thoughts exactly. Being absorbed by the skin is an observation effect as far as the universe is concerned and would collapse the wave function.
I believe you touched on part of the core issue, that apropos of nothing, the average citizen's opinion on the average news story is not worth printing. The trick then, as part of a comment/moderation system, is to put some purpose or function behind it that is more than just airing a personal opinion.
What if a comment/user feedback system was built in to the news article publishing system? What if users could submit corrections, related stories, updates, and other valuable pieces of information that an editor, moderator, or AI could then integrate into the article itself (or somewhere above the fold of general comments)?
This doesn't in theory solve the problem of requiring skilled moderation, but it changes the name of the game from "say anything you want" to "say something productive in a specific format".
You could also combine this with features like thumbs up/down buttons or less personalized ways of expressing a general opinion (similar to the scoring of posts here)... What if below each article it just had tallies of how many readers found the article (Interesting | Insightful | Biased | Incorrect | Noteworthy)... then people can make their opinion known without words that nobody wants to read.
Interesting factoid. I've got some LeGuin on my shelf waiting to be read, but haven't started yet. Must finish my Martin first, damnit! Not enough time!
As someone who actually paid money for the full Anonymizer service, I'm quite disappointed with the web interface going away and I have missed it dearly. The anonproxy.exe POS that they use crashes pretty much daily for me, something the web proxy never did. I'm upset that I've paid money for a service that lost a significant amount of its value after I purchased it.
Saying "use this standard you're not familiar with and none of your tools or partners are set up to handle" is a lot different than saying "yeah, we support what you already use"
Not everyone is deploying systems from the ground up without any legacy dependencies or integration requirements.
This type of communications device was described well and used to good effect in Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" series. He calls the device the "ansible" and it operates by sending messages through the "philotic web," an analogue to a field of quantum entities capable of entanglement.
Not every company uses computers solely for data entry. Some jobs in the tech industry actually require people to read media files on their work PCs. What if you need to share data with colleagues? Download voicemail messages? Watch video captures of software bugs occurring? At my job all our bugs come in with WMV files attached. If I couldn't view those videos, it would significantly impede my ability to do my job.
Thank you for bringing up the red herring issue. I was just telling a friend this; in order to refine the hydrogen for the fuel cells, a factory has to burn coal to make energy to refine hydrogen so all YOU get out of it when you burn it is water. But there's waste elsewhere and more energy gets burned refining it than you can produce by burning it. It's very inefficient and I wish we didn't live in an oil cartel run world where real efficiency in energy production, storage, and distribution aren't completely laughed at.
The first time I met Will Wright it was at a company picnic when he had just started pre-production on Spore. He sat around for at least a half hour just firing off his ideas about the game, and from just that one conversation I'm convinced that he won't try to release a game that falls significantly short of his vision. Of course the Spore team is in a different office now so I have no real idea of what their current progress is like, but unless EA corporate is unnecessarily rushing them, I'm confident Will will deliver a great game.
ToiletDuk
Protector of the Wastes
Similarly, I used to go to the game/chat site Uproar.com and fuck with newbies just cause it's fun. All their system moderators have Uproar in their name (like "UproarJane"), and the form that asks for your username filters out Uproar... but the second form in the process just keeps the name in a hidden field and doesn't do any more checking on it :)... Needless to say it was fun talking shit to people as a moderator :)
ToiletDuk
Protector of the Wastes
Bottom line, this chick's JAILBAIT. That's why it says "Can't Touch This" right next to her! Touch Aimster's security and you go to jail for violating the DCMA. Touch that chick and you go to jail for statutory rape.
Unless, like half the damn people on this site, you're under 15. In that case, go for it :)
ToiletDuk
Protector of the Wastes
I even remember JonKatz making a big stink about it and getting a theater manager really pissed off at him. After South Park was released I found myself (then over 18) being ID'd regularly for seeing R-rated movies that have possible youth appeal (American Pie was the first one I was ID'd for).
Anyway, I'm just saying it was the public reaction to the fact that children could possibly watch the South Park movie that really made people start to enforce the ratings.
ToiletDuk
Protector of the Wastes
ToiletDuk
Protector of the Wastes
I just wish he'd spend ten days on ONE story that's at least twice as good and ten times as short. Learn to write like Taco, Katz. You're a better speller than he is, but he lacks the curse of verbosity that you have.
ToiletDuk
Protector of the Wastes
ToiletDuk
Protector of the Wastes
ToiletDuk
Protector of the Wastes
ToiletDuk
Protector of the Wastes
ToiletDuk
Protector of the Wastes
ToiletDuk
Protector of the Wastes
ToiletDuk
Protector of the Wastes
Given, I am probably the exception to the rule, however it does go to show that your "under 20 == idiot" theory has its flaws. Yes I'll be smarter when I'm 40, but that in no way means I'm an idiot now.
ToiletDuk
Protector of the Wastes
If you are of a similar age to your superiors, especially if you are both young, you can communcate better because you feel like you are peers. I worked for a startup of 20-somethings where I regularly called the founder an asshole and vice versa, because we got along well.
ToiletDuk
Protector of the Wastes