I get the impression this gentleman has made his fortune from his business and so can afford to apologize and shut down. Drummer in a rock band? It's a nice retirement hobby for a rich young lad.
To be an effective entity, one needs well-defined goals with benchmarks. Only then will we have a way to gauge our success.
Fair enough, but does that goal have to be Mars? Why not a long-duration mission on the Moon? If we can't achieve a viable Moonbase then we have no real right to be flying to Mars.
If people are serious about colonizing space, then credible work making long-duration spaceflight both affordable and viable would seem to be a first. Commercial exploitation of the Moon would seem to be a reasonable first step rather than grand gestrues at exploration.
Yes, launch costs need to become radically cheaper. However, a number of nations and agencies such as Russia, China, NASA and the ESA have been working on this for years. My understanding is that in real terms savings have been marginal while accidents -- very expensive accidents -- keep occurring. In spite of all the R&D both costs and risks have not crossed the threshold that makes manned spaceflight commercially desirable. Why is that?
I have to question the notion that the technical problems can be solved quickly, even pooling resources. Great breakthroughs have not been as forthcoming in spaceflight as they were in the aeronautics industry in the early 20th Century. Technical progress in key engineering areas, such as fuels and materials, has been gradual, not radical. I have no doubt that progress will eventually come, but I suspect that might be a lot slower than we want. In more than four decades of manned spaceflight we haven't gotten further than the Moon. How can we be sure that Mars is not another four or more decades away, and what are the stepping stones to getting there?
There is a disturbing school of thought that says that great technological innovation is the product of war. Certainly the space race was part of a Cold War, when it was feared that the Russians could hurl nuclear weapons from the Moon, and the one of the prizes was military space superiority. One wonders whether the drive into space will be militarily-led. What if China doesn't go bust and affords colonies on the Moon? Will the US follow suit? Will space exploration end up being nothing more than a cosmic land grab?
> Of course you may argue that the technology is not there yet. And you would be right, but the only thing we can do to overcome this problem is to start developing and using it. Sitting back and hoping that it will just materialize is not going to work.
Fair enough. However, it seems to me that the journey to Mars will not be a grand leap but the product of stepping-stones that may take decades or to build.
We have become used to the idea of rapid technological progress, even though our experience of it is relatively recent. We went from Kitty Hawk to jet aircraft in less than 40 years. At 20th Century rates of progress we might have expected to go from Apollo to Mars colonies in the following three decades, and many expected that to happen. But it didn't, and space travel is still expensive and risky.
My understanding of space is that the technological hurdles are much greater than most of the public percieve. They are real, hard limits on our ability to do things in space. And experience has not reduced costs significantly. The rapid progress paradigm does not apply to space travel. We might have to accept that it may take a century to get a man on Mars. It might be much less than this, but right now we cannot make assumptions that gumption and cash and good old frontier spirit will get us there any earlier.
> So are you saying that space travel won't improve at all in the next three centuries, or do you just not know the difference between the continent of America and the United States thereof.
I'm saying different conditions apply. It did not require a technological leap to discover America, and once found the resources needed to get there were modest and affordable (at least for commercial companies and combines of investors). Current technology makes a Mars mission prohibitively expensive right now for everyone.
Now, in fifty or a hundred years time we might have cheap, safe and reliable lift capacity to make the payload problem less of an issue, and essential problems of long term habitation may well have been resolved. I imagine those problems will have been solved closer to home, in near-Earth orbit or on the Moon.
Unlike America, which took courage and a leap of faith, Mars will require a series of stepping-stones. Rather than couching our goal as Mars, maybe we should be setting our sights at something more achievable.
Oh, and thanks for correcting me regarding the America/US thing.
> You're exactly the person Bradbury says we should ignore: cold and calculating.
If you knew me I suspect you'd agree that wasn't true. I'm caught up with the thrill of space travel as well.
This is not about calculation or calculation. It's about the lure of a grand romantic cause sending people off on a wild goose chase, expending vast treasure and energies tilting at windmills when we might have better things to do with the cash (starting with tax cuts). People keep casting Mars in parallel with the colonization of America but I have to question that parallel. I've read enough literature on prospective Mars missions to know that those don't stand up to close examination. You can't simply charter a sturdy ship and trust to courage and navigation to get you to a new world. The technological hurdle is huge, the returns miniscule. Nothing in any of Bush's speeches has indicated that America is going to Mars for any reason other than the sheer adventure; everything else is ill-defined.
The Moon is a considerably simpler world to colonize but no-one has yet set up shop there since our first few visits. So why should Mars be any better bet? Maybe we should colonize the Moon first. Use that as our testbed to check the feasibility of an outreach into the solar system.
Why not the Moon first? Why leap, as they are proposing, straight to Mars? And why not leave it to private industry? Why throw public money at this?
I also agree that 'fixing' Earth may be unachievable and I don't profess to have all the answers.
However, Bradbury talks about new lands and new opportunities and promises much for them. However, I still don't see how we will not export many of our problems with us. After all, what is now the United States was ruled by a British monarch for a good chunk of its history following the initial colonisation. If a few battles had gone differently, the experiment with American democracy might have become a footnote in the history books. It is not a given that the American experiment would have succeeded.
Who is to say that a Martian colony might fail to slough off its past and remained chained to Earth as a slave vassal? Or what if it creates something new and dangerous? What if the harsh frontier of Mars did not produce new democrats but a fascist oligarchy instead?
This is not to say such a thing would happen, but to question the notion that the drive into space automatically results in social progress, which is what Bradbury claims. There are lots of 'ifs', 'ands' and 'buts' here. The optimist will say 'well, that's no reason NOT to try the experiment', and they'd be right. However, it's not unreasonable to approach the prospect of space colonisation cautiously. Instead of the new frontier we might get a new race of Teutonic knights - interplanetary crusaders conquering all before them in the name of America and its allies.
> Have you any idea what kind of resources are in space?
Yes I do. But nobody seems to be rushing to grab them. If we truly had the technology and the pickings were out there, why aren't Exxon or some other commercial conglomerates up there now, strip-mining asteroids and cracking fuel on the Martian surface?
We know that the resources are there, but the investment required to exploit them is beyond the means of the world's biggest corporations. If it was affordable and achievable they'd be there. The fact that they are not indicates a number of things:
(a) The cost is unaffordable.
(b) The technology has not been perfected.
(c) The commercial risk is too high.
The spirit of Columbus was powered by the prospect of commerce and riches. If that impulse has not yet got us to Mars, then you have to ask what will? Bradbury couches it in terms of epihanies and romance. But romance does not pay a multi-trillion bill for the 80-20 chance of getting a handful of technicians to the Martian surface.
I'm a romantic who is caught up in the notion of the Outleap to space, but Bradbury's Pollyannish predictions are difficult to swallow. Space travel as a catalyst for political epiphany? Mars as the place where democracy is finally perfected and poverty solved?
This is quite some form of cosmic transferrence. We have failed here on Earth so somehow a new world will be better? The cynic in me is stamping all over my romantic side with large boots.
I recall an Arthur Clarke's novel where he predicts that cheap international telephone calls will bringing down many of the world's political barriers because of the improvement in communication. Well, we've seen a version of this come true with the internet and the jury is still out as to whether improved global comms has made mankind unite as one, or ever will. Humanity, if anything, seems more polarized and divided into tiny like-minded niche communities than ever, and if anything the internet has facilitated that. If the internet can't bring man together, why should I believe a trip across the inky black would do it?
We are, it must be said, well into Bill Hicks territory here. He finished his gigs with a wish that mankind would climb spaceships into the void and somehow the world's insanity would be cured. Life in infinite space would drain us of all our hatred and rottenness. I loved Bill's comedy but I always felt this was a cop-out. Maybe the REAL romantic solution would be to forget Mars and think about spaceship Earth. Get this little baby fixed first. Because going somewhere else certainly ain't going to cure it.
It's an odd document. You can imagine the commission members looking at each other and asking: "what's Ray on?" He sells the Outreach as a romantic, almost religious experience. But I have trouble imagining how romance in and of itself is enough to power man to Mars.
The parallels with American colonization do not stand up. Once America had been discovered and the seas charted, it was a matter of affordable logistics and courage, not technology, to get people to the US. But the logistics of a Mars mission require the exchequer of a major nation state and the technology is far from perfected. Courage is not enough. And unlike America the lure, the promise of a commercial harvest is so much slimmer. This is not 1482 any more. Those rules no longer apply.
My heart agrees with Bradbury. But my head... it says no.
Going back even as early as U.S. FFIII (FFVI in the series) it was always the evil, greedy, corrupt, industrialized nations at war with the peaceful, kind, gentle, treehuging fairie creatures who lived in harmony with nature.
But isn't this simply drawing on source material such as Tolkien? The Lord of the Rings novel ends with a vision of bucolic rustics reclaiming their world from wicked industrializers. Agreed it's a political subtext, but also it's building on genre conventions.
There are some genres where it's hard to avoid a political agenda informing the game in some form or other. A few years back I designed some combat flight sims and had to devise background material for the campaigns. The temptation to editorialize on a subjects such as, say, the drugs war in Colombia was strong. For the most part I resisted and I hope found a middle way between Hollywood druglord fantasies and the political realities of what was going on in the country at the time. (And today: it's shocking how some of the events I built the campaign around later came true.)
So in my game I had FARC narcoguerrillas, right-wing death squads and I penalized the player for causing unnessesary collateral damage. There are some who will no doubt think I went to far, as if games on current events can somehow be cosily insulated from politics. But I reckon I did the right thing.
As a long-time Mac user at home (though my day job is shackled to Wintel product) I'm in this odd position of desiring a non-MS solution for work, but being perfectly happy with my OSX box after-hours. I'm genuinely interested in Linux and open source, but can't see the benefit of porting from my Mac OS with all its integrated features. (My home machine is primarily used for 2D graphics work with Adobe Illustrator and PhotoShop.)
Are there any compelling reasons for me to change?
Well, maybe not all of them, but I love mine. But to get where I am now I served a long 'apprenticeship' doing all manner of squalid white- and blue-collar joe-jobs from selling to warehouse labour, from operating forklifts to (literally) shit-shovelling. I've been in some awful jobs and it has made me ever so appreciative of the career I have now.
So when I see IT professionals boo-hooing about their lot, it's hard to empathize. Maybe a few have come up into their careers from tough jobs like I have. But all too many are pampered middle-class lads and lasses who have never known hardship or the desperation that comes with low-paid work. Given the money that even the meanest-paid of them get, I cannot shed a tear for them.
One of the better riffs on War of the Worlds has been the most recent Alan Moore comic-book The League of Extraordinary Gentleman which managed to shoehorn in John Carter of Mars, Doctor Moreau, Rupert the Bear and Tiger Tim(!) into the heady mix.
In that, the Martians are destroyed by a hideous bioweapon launched by masonic grenadiers, only for the head of British intelligence to inform the League that Her Majesty's govt. would spin the story so that everyone believed it was caused by the common cold.
Top stuff from Mister Moore and worth a punt!
A gambler. (One who "punts" money on the horses.)
A customer of goods or services. These days the term is applied so broadly it can refer to any member of the great British public: anyone who is in the market for goods, services or help. "It's what the punters want," is an excuse for pandering to the lowest common denomenator.
I have already sent the Presidential commission a suggestion to use midgets for the crew of the Mars mission. Massive savings on payload weight and demand on consumbles are my justification. Of course, the candidates will require degrees in engineering and other sciences, and they will have to be flight trained on specially adapted aircraft, but I think this could be the big breakthrough for the program that makes it feasible.
Brings a whole new meaning to "One small step for mankind".
We have the game here. No, really. It is as bad as the reviews says. We downloaded the patch (which apparently includes 'AI') and it doesn't make a damn difference.
It is, however, a comedy game. It gave us at least 10 minutes of entertainment laughing at something so inept. We also wondered whether the QA guy at Activision Budget would hold onto his job in the wake of this.
I was given to understand that a handful of blockbsters aside, most movies have not gotten into the black before they release the DVD. They very much rely on video and TV rights sales to make the big bucks. Increasingly, movies are the trailers for the video sale.
No offense, but why do you find that simple observation offensive?
It ticks me off because it tells me nothing new that I didn't already know. More to the point, it tells me that MS are only just beginning to wake up and learn it themselves. Unfortunately, they are tied into a management structure that is oriented to building non-game apps. Though their games division is crewed by many games enthusiasts, the management is suffocating. I hear the bosses mouth the words "fun" but they don't appear to understand it. To them a game is another app to be pushed out the door. The enthusiasts seems to be losing the battle.
Is it really the first time you hear that people want fun in a game? Do you _really_ need an usability study to tell you that the vast majority of the population would very much prefer a clean intuitive interface, and clean intuitive controls?
None of us get up in the morning and say "I'm going to make a non-fun game". None of us go to the office and say to ourselves "I want an interface that is opaque to newbies and a control mechanism that you need the thumbs o' God to master". Those of us who have been around long enough to hone our craft aim for fun and for accessibility. We are painfully aware of it. Our livelihoods depend on it. If we don't bring home the bacon we are out of work. Period. And this goes triple for those of us working on consoles, where the games must be able to be mastered by Joe Public. It's why God invented focus-testing. To keep us honest.
Yes, I know the "I'm a super-star and an artist, I don't care what people want, and I won't let demographics tarnish my vision" snydrome that plagues some designers and graphics artists. Honestly, I wish those would just crawl somewhere and die. Painfully. Slowly. Or just die.
I don't know where you've met these people. But they tend not to survive for very long in the biz. Most of us GDs are realists in an industry where margins (at least at the developer's end) are tight and the stakes are high. We can't afford to screw up. I am making games in a commercial market. I make them for the end-user. I don't have the luxury to make them for myself.
Maybe in your imaginary world, all that matters is making art for art's sake. Well, then I don't want to buy your games. It's that simple. And _that_ is what Microsoft has been trying to tell you. That making art is good and fine, but if you keep going in that direction, there won't be enough buyers to pay your bills. Most of us, if given half a choice, will instead buy games with a clean intuitive interface, good controlls, a smooth learning curve, and a more reasonable difficulty curve. I.e., games made by people who actually cared about usability and focus groups.
Uh, you mean people who care like me? Here we come back to the difference between MS and Nintendo. Nintendo will want you to prototype a game. They don't care about graphics, they want to see gameplay demonstrated. They want to see if the concept is fun or not. They want to focus test at the earliest stages. Their approach is hands-on and practical. By contrast MS prototype to make pretty demos to their marketing division and their gameplay concerns are restricted to checking off boxes on a fat list supplied by usability. Now you tell me which company has the better track record of making triple-A games with intuitive interfaces and well-balanced learning and difficulty curves? Hmm?
So why is it offensive if Microsoft is actually interested in what Joe Average actually wants to play? No, really.
Because the inherent assumption in this facile piece of MS puffery is that (a) nobody else does this, and (b) only MS understand The True Path. Neither of which are true. If MS have had a Damascene conversion to the virtues of gameplay, great. But don't dis the rest of us hardworking Joes who've known this for years and are out there delivering the real thing.
And yes, mod this as flamebait if you want to, but some things jus
I found them to be pretty good on the management side. They were in many ways the best and most professional publisher I've ever worked with. They were reasonable and their expectations were well-managed. When we found the product was over-specced they were amenable to downscoping. However, they are clueless about gameplay.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned in this discussion is the role of the games press. This is quite important. We are, as developers, under pressure to create games that get high score ratings in the press. These scores are so improtant to the marketing, that considerable skulduggery (did I say bribes?) are deployed to get them. The difference between a score of 8 or 9 (or 80% and 90%) can make all the difference when pushing product. It can be the difference between a triple-A hit and a single-A bomb.
At the end of the day it means the game must, in part, be honed to appeal to the games journos, who are to a man hard-core gamers. Indeed their appeal to authority in the press relies on the "I'm hardcore so takle my word for it" assertion. With console games in particular you have to tread a fine line betwen accessibility and hardcore appeal. You need a 'crossover' hit, and that's a difficult target to reach.
I have a fairly low opinion of the journos. I see them as parasites, but necessary ones. They have power over your game so you are forced into a symbiotic relationship. However, their interests do not necessarily coincide with those of the buying public. They are the first to dis a game for under-par graphics or the lack of a particular fad feature. The latest fad is online support for console games. It doesn't matter if the install base for online PS2s is a tiny portion of the market, the journos will score you way down for not having the feature. They can kill your game if you do not please them.
So we have a dilemma: to sell the games we must have hardcore appeal. This means the default play must be sufficiently tough to satisfy the hardcore. Of course, this means that Joe Public must dilute the game experience by playing at simple level. And Joe Public doesn't necessarily like that. Or they don't have the presence of mind to change the difficulty settings. The result is that many console games are a shade tougher than they probably should be. But to fix it... ah, we are back to that Catch 22 situation again.
Companies are concentrating on mass-appeal over fun.
Sorry. Gotta disagree. Companies, quite reasonably, equate mass-appeal with fun. If it wasn't fun, why would so many people buy it?
The key point here is that publishers are not dumb. They know the market and have spent a lot of dough researching it. They know that 90% of revenue is generated by less than 10% of titles. This fact alone tells you that the public can spot a lemon. If games aren't fun - if they don't hit that spot - then the product dies. Publishers put us developers under a lot of pressure to make a game fun. Nobody got rich by making 'not-fun' games.
What's with this business about 'dumbing down'? This is games we are talking about, not high literature or art movies. Games are fun. A diversion. A distraction. In what way should we make them 'smart' as opposed to 'dumb'? Games are about gratification. That could be the gratification of fragging a bad guy into a pink cloud of flesh or solving a tricky mental puzzle. But 'dumbing down' doesn't come into it. It's a game. Nothing more and nothing less.
I've made PC games, I've made console games. Consoles is where the money is. The stakes are highest there. And when it comes to consoles we don't have the luxury to make 'complicated crap'. Keep It Simple, Stupid rules apply. In general, nobody wants to make crap. And everyone tries to keep games from being complicated. That's why we focus-test.
Gameplay is king. Any GD worth his salt knows this. Increasingly, producers are coming to realize this too. Marketing muppets know it intellectually, but are ruled by their hearts and are too easily impressed by cool-looking technology. There remains a massive premium on making a game look good at all costs. No-one puts out a crap-looking game. That puts an increasing strain on budgets.
Believe me, we games designers are your last, best hope for a fun game. We work hard at it. If we fail, it's because (a) we are human and make errors of judgement, or (b) because external factors (read: publisher fiat) compromised us. But it's certainly not for want of trying. All games designers want their games to be fun. We never take our eyes off that ball.
To make a game is like herding cats. You have a lot of conflicting requirements to juggle. It must look good, it must play good, it must have all the cute features the publisher wants and you must deliver it for submission in twelve months on a budget that's 60% of what you really need and with tools that are not fully mature. And you have to aim for an exacting audience who will probably only buy a handful of titles this year and so are hyper-critical of any failing. The pressure for a triple-A title is enormous. Sometimes that pressure can dislocate a project and send it spinning off into oblivion. I've seen this happen.
Strategies for reducing the risk are manifold. It usually starts with marketing and product research; building on a knowledge base about a game genre. The MS approach is to try and analyse everything through usability and come up with exhaustive list of guidelines and do's and don't. Nintendo's is to finance prototypes to prove gameplay.
Now here's where an interesting difference in approach lies: MS game prototyping tries to prove the technology and work pipeline, whereas Nintendo is purely to prove the control system and gameplay. MS require the developer to make a nice-looking demo. Nintendo say: "we don't care about appearance in the prototype - those objects can be untextured cubes for all we care. We want to see the game". I've never heard any other publisher say something as extraordinary as that. There, in a nutshell, is the reason why Nintendo make great games. Their focus is on the right place from day one.
In a well-managed project, somewhere in the risk management process, complexity tends to go by the wayside. Features are cut. There comes an increased focus on core gameplay. Good GDs know this is coming and rise to it. But it's a tough commercial environment out there. Sometimes you catch the lightning. Sometimes you don't. I've been in this industry for a decade. If I could predict trends accurately I'd be a rich man by now. I'm not rich, and that speaks volumes about my hit rate. So I do the best I can.
An aside: all the major consoles are currently in the middle of their product cycle. The publishers do not have the money to innovate. They want to make money - to amortize on their earlier investements in next-gen consoles - and so are concentrating on bread-and-butter titles. The familiar, successful genres. So don't expect innovation on consoles in the near future. Because, quite literally, no-one can afford it. This includes MS, which maybe why they are focussing on core 'value added' virtues such as gameplay.
Slashdot Mirror
I get the impression this gentleman has made his fortune from his business and so can afford to apologize and shut down. Drummer in a rock band? It's a nice retirement hobby for a rich young lad.
To be an effective entity, one needs well-defined goals with benchmarks. Only then will we have a way to gauge our success.
Fair enough, but does that goal have to be Mars? Why not a long-duration mission on the Moon? If we can't achieve a viable Moonbase then we have no real right to be flying to Mars.
If people are serious about colonizing space, then credible work making long-duration spaceflight both affordable and viable would seem to be a first. Commercial exploitation of the Moon would seem to be a reasonable first step rather than grand gestrues at exploration.
Yes, launch costs need to become radically cheaper. However, a number of nations and agencies such as Russia, China, NASA and the ESA have been working on this for years. My understanding is that in real terms savings have been marginal while accidents -- very expensive accidents -- keep occurring. In spite of all the R&D both costs and risks have not crossed the threshold that makes manned spaceflight commercially desirable. Why is that?
I have to question the notion that the technical problems can be solved quickly, even pooling resources. Great breakthroughs have not been as forthcoming in spaceflight as they were in the aeronautics industry in the early 20th Century. Technical progress in key engineering areas, such as fuels and materials, has been gradual, not radical. I have no doubt that progress will eventually come, but I suspect that might be a lot slower than we want. In more than four decades of manned spaceflight we haven't gotten further than the Moon. How can we be sure that Mars is not another four or more decades away, and what are the stepping stones to getting there?
There is a disturbing school of thought that says that great technological innovation is the product of war. Certainly the space race was part of a Cold War, when it was feared that the Russians could hurl nuclear weapons from the Moon, and the one of the prizes was military space superiority. One wonders whether the drive into space will be militarily-led. What if China doesn't go bust and affords colonies on the Moon? Will the US follow suit? Will space exploration end up being nothing more than a cosmic land grab?
> Of course you may argue that the technology is not there yet. And you would be right, but the only thing we can do to overcome this problem is to start developing and using it. Sitting back and hoping that it will just materialize is not going to work.
Fair enough. However, it seems to me that the journey to Mars will not be a grand leap but the product of stepping-stones that may take decades or to build.
We have become used to the idea of rapid technological progress, even though our experience of it is relatively recent. We went from Kitty Hawk to jet aircraft in less than 40 years. At 20th Century rates of progress we might have expected to go from Apollo to Mars colonies in the following three decades, and many expected that to happen. But it didn't, and space travel is still expensive and risky.
My understanding of space is that the technological hurdles are much greater than most of the public percieve. They are real, hard limits on our ability to do things in space. And experience has not reduced costs significantly. The rapid progress paradigm does not apply to space travel. We might have to accept that it may take a century to get a man on Mars. It might be much less than this, but right now we cannot make assumptions that gumption and cash and good old frontier spirit will get us there any earlier.
> So are you saying that space travel won't improve at all in the next three centuries, or do you just not know the difference between the continent of America and the United States thereof.
I'm saying different conditions apply. It did not require a technological leap to discover America, and once found the resources needed to get there were modest and affordable (at least for commercial companies and combines of investors). Current technology makes a Mars mission prohibitively expensive right now for everyone.
Now, in fifty or a hundred years time we might have cheap, safe and reliable lift capacity to make the payload problem less of an issue, and essential problems of long term habitation may well have been resolved. I imagine those problems will have been solved closer to home, in near-Earth orbit or on the Moon.
Unlike America, which took courage and a leap of faith, Mars will require a series of stepping-stones. Rather than couching our goal as Mars, maybe we should be setting our sights at something more achievable.
Oh, and thanks for correcting me regarding the America/US thing.
> You're exactly the person Bradbury says we should ignore: cold and calculating.
If you knew me I suspect you'd agree that wasn't true. I'm caught up with the thrill of space travel as well.
This is not about calculation or calculation. It's about the lure of a grand romantic cause sending people off on a wild goose chase, expending vast treasure and energies tilting at windmills when we might have better things to do with the cash (starting with tax cuts). People keep casting Mars in parallel with the colonization of America but I have to question that parallel. I've read enough literature on prospective Mars missions to know that those don't stand up to close examination. You can't simply charter a sturdy ship and trust to courage and navigation to get you to a new world. The technological hurdle is huge, the returns miniscule. Nothing in any of Bush's speeches has indicated that America is going to Mars for any reason other than the sheer adventure; everything else is ill-defined.
The Moon is a considerably simpler world to colonize but no-one has yet set up shop there since our first few visits. So why should Mars be any better bet? Maybe we should colonize the Moon first. Use that as our testbed to check the feasibility of an outreach into the solar system.
Why not the Moon first? Why leap, as they are proposing, straight to Mars? And why not leave it to private industry? Why throw public money at this?
I also agree that 'fixing' Earth may be unachievable and I don't profess to have all the answers.
However, Bradbury talks about new lands and new opportunities and promises much for them. However, I still don't see how we will not export many of our problems with us. After all, what is now the United States was ruled by a British monarch for a good chunk of its history following the initial colonisation. If a few battles had gone differently, the experiment with American democracy might have become a footnote in the history books. It is not a given that the American experiment would have succeeded.
Who is to say that a Martian colony might fail to slough off its past and remained chained to Earth as a slave vassal? Or what if it creates something new and dangerous? What if the harsh frontier of Mars did not produce new democrats but a fascist oligarchy instead?
This is not to say such a thing would happen, but to question the notion that the drive into space automatically results in social progress, which is what Bradbury claims. There are lots of 'ifs', 'ands' and 'buts' here. The optimist will say 'well, that's no reason NOT to try the experiment', and they'd be right. However, it's not unreasonable to approach the prospect of space colonisation cautiously. Instead of the new frontier we might get a new race of Teutonic knights - interplanetary crusaders conquering all before them in the name of America and its allies.
The future is not always bright.
> Have you any idea what kind of resources are in space?
Yes I do. But nobody seems to be rushing to grab them. If we truly had the technology and the pickings were out there, why aren't Exxon or some other commercial conglomerates up there now, strip-mining asteroids and cracking fuel on the Martian surface?
We know that the resources are there, but the investment required to exploit them is beyond the means of the world's biggest corporations. If it was affordable and achievable they'd be there. The fact that they are not indicates a number of things:
(a) The cost is unaffordable.
(b) The technology has not been perfected.
(c) The commercial risk is too high.
The spirit of Columbus was powered by the prospect of commerce and riches. If that impulse has not yet got us to Mars, then you have to ask what will? Bradbury couches it in terms of epihanies and romance. But romance does not pay a multi-trillion bill for the 80-20 chance of getting a handful of technicians to the Martian surface.
I'm a romantic who is caught up in the notion of the Outleap to space, but Bradbury's Pollyannish predictions are difficult to swallow. Space travel as a catalyst for political epiphany? Mars as the place where democracy is finally perfected and poverty solved?
This is quite some form of cosmic transferrence. We have failed here on Earth so somehow a new world will be better? The cynic in me is stamping all over my romantic side with large boots.
I recall an Arthur Clarke's novel where he predicts that cheap international telephone calls will bringing down many of the world's political barriers because of the improvement in communication. Well, we've seen a version of this come true with the internet and the jury is still out as to whether improved global comms has made mankind unite as one, or ever will. Humanity, if anything, seems more polarized and divided into tiny like-minded niche communities than ever, and if anything the internet has facilitated that. If the internet can't bring man together, why should I believe a trip across the inky black would do it?
We are, it must be said, well into Bill Hicks territory here. He finished his gigs with a wish that mankind would climb spaceships into the void and somehow the world's insanity would be cured. Life in infinite space would drain us of all our hatred and rottenness. I loved Bill's comedy but I always felt this was a cop-out. Maybe the REAL romantic solution would be to forget Mars and think about spaceship Earth. Get this little baby fixed first. Because going somewhere else certainly ain't going to cure it.
It's an odd document. You can imagine the commission members looking at each other and asking: "what's Ray on?" He sells the Outreach as a romantic, almost religious experience. But I have trouble imagining how romance in and of itself is enough to power man to Mars.
The parallels with American colonization do not stand up. Once America had been discovered and the seas charted, it was a matter of affordable logistics and courage, not technology, to get people to the US. But the logistics of a Mars mission require the exchequer of a major nation state and the technology is far from perfected. Courage is not enough. And unlike America the lure, the promise of a commercial harvest is so much slimmer. This is not 1482 any more. Those rules no longer apply.
My heart agrees with Bradbury. But my head... it says no.
There are some genres where it's hard to avoid a political agenda informing the game in some form or other. A few years back I designed some combat flight sims and had to devise background material for the campaigns. The temptation to editorialize on a subjects such as, say, the drugs war in Colombia was strong. For the most part I resisted and I hope found a middle way between Hollywood druglord fantasies and the political realities of what was going on in the country at the time. (And today: it's shocking how some of the events I built the campaign around later came true.)
So in my game I had FARC narcoguerrillas, right-wing death squads and I penalized the player for causing unnessesary collateral damage. There are some who will no doubt think I went to far, as if games on current events can somehow be cosily insulated from politics. But I reckon I did the right thing.
As a long-time Mac user at home (though my day job is shackled to Wintel product) I'm in this odd position of desiring a non-MS solution for work, but being perfectly happy with my OSX box after-hours. I'm genuinely interested in Linux and open source, but can't see the benefit of porting from my Mac OS with all its integrated features. (My home machine is primarily used for 2D graphics work with Adobe Illustrator and PhotoShop.) Are there any compelling reasons for me to change?
Well, maybe not all of them, but I love mine. But to get where I am now I served a long 'apprenticeship' doing all manner of squalid white- and blue-collar joe-jobs from selling to warehouse labour, from operating forklifts to (literally) shit-shovelling. I've been in some awful jobs and it has made me ever so appreciative of the career I have now.
So when I see IT professionals boo-hooing about their lot, it's hard to empathize. Maybe a few have come up into their careers from tough jobs like I have. But all too many are pampered middle-class lads and lasses who have never known hardship or the desperation that comes with low-paid work. Given the money that even the meanest-paid of them get, I cannot shed a tear for them.
One of the better riffs on War of the Worlds has been the most recent Alan Moore comic-book The League of Extraordinary Gentleman which managed to shoehorn in John Carter of Mars, Doctor Moreau, Rupert the Bear and Tiger Tim(!) into the heady mix.
In that, the Martians are destroyed by a hideous bioweapon launched by masonic grenadiers, only for the head of British intelligence to inform the League that Her Majesty's govt. would spin the story so that everyone believed it was caused by the common cold.
Top stuff from Mister Moore and worth a punt!
A gambler. (One who "punts" money on the horses.) A customer of goods or services. These days the term is applied so broadly it can refer to any member of the great British public: anyone who is in the market for goods, services or help. "It's what the punters want," is an excuse for pandering to the lowest common denomenator.
I have already sent the Presidential commission a suggestion to use midgets for the crew of the Mars mission. Massive savings on payload weight and demand on consumbles are my justification. Of course, the candidates will require degrees in engineering and other sciences, and they will have to be flight trained on specially adapted aircraft, but I think this could be the big breakthrough for the program that makes it feasible. Brings a whole new meaning to "One small step for mankind".
We have the game here. No, really. It is as bad as the reviews says. We downloaded the patch (which apparently includes 'AI') and it doesn't make a damn difference. It is, however, a comedy game. It gave us at least 10 minutes of entertainment laughing at something so inept. We also wondered whether the QA guy at Activision Budget would hold onto his job in the wake of this.
I was given to understand that a handful of blockbsters aside, most movies have not gotten into the black before they release the DVD. They very much rely on video and TV rights sales to make the big bucks. Increasingly, movies are the trailers for the video sale.
No offense, but why do you find that simple observation offensive?
It ticks me off because it tells me nothing new that I didn't already know. More to the point, it tells me that MS are only just beginning to wake up and learn it themselves. Unfortunately, they are tied into a management structure that is oriented to building non-game apps. Though their games division is crewed by many games enthusiasts, the management is suffocating. I hear the bosses mouth the words "fun" but they don't appear to understand it. To them a game is another app to be pushed out the door. The enthusiasts seems to be losing the battle.
Is it really the first time you hear that people want fun in a game? Do you _really_ need an usability study to tell you that the vast majority of the population would very much prefer a clean intuitive interface, and clean intuitive controls?
None of us get up in the morning and say "I'm going to make a non-fun game". None of us go to the office and say to ourselves "I want an interface that is opaque to newbies and a control mechanism that you need the thumbs o' God to master". Those of us who have been around long enough to hone our craft aim for fun and for accessibility. We are painfully aware of it. Our livelihoods depend on it. If we don't bring home the bacon we are out of work. Period. And this goes triple for those of us working on consoles, where the games must be able to be mastered by Joe Public. It's why God invented focus-testing. To keep us honest.
Yes, I know the "I'm a super-star and an artist, I don't care what people want, and I won't let demographics tarnish my vision" snydrome that plagues some designers and graphics artists. Honestly, I wish those would just crawl somewhere and die. Painfully. Slowly. Or just die.
I don't know where you've met these people. But they tend not to survive for very long in the biz. Most of us GDs are realists in an industry where margins (at least at the developer's end) are tight and the stakes are high. We can't afford to screw up. I am making games in a commercial market. I make them for the end-user. I don't have the luxury to make them for myself.
Maybe in your imaginary world, all that matters is making art for art's sake. Well, then I don't want to buy your games. It's that simple. And _that_ is what Microsoft has been trying to tell you. That making art is good and fine, but if you keep going in that direction, there won't be enough buyers to pay your bills. Most of us, if given half a choice, will instead buy games with a clean intuitive interface, good controlls, a smooth learning curve, and a more reasonable difficulty curve. I.e., games made by people who actually cared about usability and focus groups.
Uh, you mean people who care like me? Here we come back to the difference between MS and Nintendo. Nintendo will want you to prototype a game. They don't care about graphics, they want to see gameplay demonstrated. They want to see if the concept is fun or not. They want to focus test at the earliest stages. Their approach is hands-on and practical. By contrast MS prototype to make pretty demos to their marketing division and their gameplay concerns are restricted to checking off boxes on a fat list supplied by usability. Now you tell me which company has the better track record of making triple-A games with intuitive interfaces and well-balanced learning and difficulty curves? Hmm?
So why is it offensive if Microsoft is actually interested in what Joe Average actually wants to play? No, really.
Because the inherent assumption in this facile piece of MS puffery is that (a) nobody else does this, and (b) only MS understand The True Path. Neither of which are true. If MS have had a Damascene conversion to the virtues of gameplay, great. But don't dis the rest of us hardworking Joes who've known this for years and are out there delivering the real thing.
And yes, mod this as flamebait if you want to, but some things jus
I found them to be pretty good on the management side. They were in many ways the best and most professional publisher I've ever worked with. They were reasonable and their expectations were well-managed. When we found the product was over-specced they were amenable to downscoping. However, they are clueless about gameplay.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned in this discussion is the role of the games press. This is quite important. We are, as developers, under pressure to create games that get high score ratings in the press. These scores are so improtant to the marketing, that considerable skulduggery (did I say bribes?) are deployed to get them. The difference between a score of 8 or 9 (or 80% and 90%) can make all the difference when pushing product. It can be the difference between a triple-A hit and a single-A bomb.
At the end of the day it means the game must, in part, be honed to appeal to the games journos, who are to a man hard-core gamers. Indeed their appeal to authority in the press relies on the "I'm hardcore so takle my word for it" assertion. With console games in particular you have to tread a fine line betwen accessibility and hardcore appeal. You need a 'crossover' hit, and that's a difficult target to reach.
I have a fairly low opinion of the journos. I see them as parasites, but necessary ones. They have power over your game so you are forced into a symbiotic relationship. However, their interests do not necessarily coincide with those of the buying public. They are the first to dis a game for under-par graphics or the lack of a particular fad feature. The latest fad is online support for console games. It doesn't matter if the install base for online PS2s is a tiny portion of the market, the journos will score you way down for not having the feature. They can kill your game if you do not please them.
So we have a dilemma: to sell the games we must have hardcore appeal. This means the default play must be sufficiently tough to satisfy the hardcore. Of course, this means that Joe Public must dilute the game experience by playing at simple level. And Joe Public doesn't necessarily like that. Or they don't have the presence of mind to change the difficulty settings. The result is that many console games are a shade tougher than they probably should be. But to fix it... ah, we are back to that Catch 22 situation again.
Companies are concentrating on mass-appeal over fun.
Sorry. Gotta disagree. Companies, quite reasonably, equate mass-appeal with fun. If it wasn't fun, why would so many people buy it?
The key point here is that publishers are not dumb. They know the market and have spent a lot of dough researching it. They know that 90% of revenue is generated by less than 10% of titles. This fact alone tells you that the public can spot a lemon. If games aren't fun - if they don't hit that spot - then the product dies. Publishers put us developers under a lot of pressure to make a game fun. Nobody got rich by making 'not-fun' games.
What's with this business about 'dumbing down'? This is games we are talking about, not high literature or art movies. Games are fun. A diversion. A distraction. In what way should we make them 'smart' as opposed to 'dumb'? Games are about gratification. That could be the gratification of fragging a bad guy into a pink cloud of flesh or solving a tricky mental puzzle. But 'dumbing down' doesn't come into it. It's a game. Nothing more and nothing less.
I've made PC games, I've made console games. Consoles is where the money is. The stakes are highest there. And when it comes to consoles we don't have the luxury to make 'complicated crap'. Keep It Simple, Stupid rules apply. In general, nobody wants to make crap. And everyone tries to keep games from being complicated. That's why we focus-test.
Gameplay is king. Any GD worth his salt knows this. Increasingly, producers are coming to realize this too. Marketing muppets know it intellectually, but are ruled by their hearts and are too easily impressed by cool-looking technology. There remains a massive premium on making a game look good at all costs. No-one puts out a crap-looking game. That puts an increasing strain on budgets.
Believe me, we games designers are your last, best hope for a fun game. We work hard at it. If we fail, it's because (a) we are human and make errors of judgement, or (b) because external factors (read: publisher fiat) compromised us. But it's certainly not for want of trying. All games designers want their games to be fun. We never take our eyes off that ball.
To make a game is like herding cats. You have a lot of conflicting requirements to juggle. It must look good, it must play good, it must have all the cute features the publisher wants and you must deliver it for submission in twelve months on a budget that's 60% of what you really need and with tools that are not fully mature. And you have to aim for an exacting audience who will probably only buy a handful of titles this year and so are hyper-critical of any failing. The pressure for a triple-A title is enormous. Sometimes that pressure can dislocate a project and send it spinning off into oblivion. I've seen this happen.
Strategies for reducing the risk are manifold. It usually starts with marketing and product research; building on a knowledge base about a game genre. The MS approach is to try and analyse everything through usability and come up with exhaustive list of guidelines and do's and don't. Nintendo's is to finance prototypes to prove gameplay.
Now here's where an interesting difference in approach lies: MS game prototyping tries to prove the technology and work pipeline, whereas Nintendo is purely to prove the control system and gameplay. MS require the developer to make a nice-looking demo. Nintendo say: "we don't care about appearance in the prototype - those objects can be untextured cubes for all we care. We want to see the game". I've never heard any other publisher say something as extraordinary as that. There, in a nutshell, is the reason why Nintendo make great games. Their focus is on the right place from day one.
In a well-managed project, somewhere in the risk management process, complexity tends to go by the wayside. Features are cut. There comes an increased focus on core gameplay. Good GDs know this is coming and rise to it. But it's a tough commercial environment out there. Sometimes you catch the lightning. Sometimes you don't. I've been in this industry for a decade. If I could predict trends accurately I'd be a rich man by now. I'm not rich, and that speaks volumes about my hit rate. So I do the best I can.
An aside: all the major consoles are currently in the middle of their product cycle. The publishers do not have the money to innovate. They want to make money - to amortize on their earlier investements in next-gen consoles - and so are concentrating on bread-and-butter titles. The familiar, successful genres. So don't expect innovation on consoles in the near future. Because, quite literally, no-one can afford it. This includes MS, which maybe why they are focussing on core 'value added' virtues such as gameplay.