"Why in the 21st century should we suddenly expect art to be free?"
Because all of a sudden in the 21st century the costs of reproducing said art has dropped to zero (well, as close to zero as you're likely to ever see). So once the artist has been compensated for the initial act of creativity, there's nothing left to pay for.
The record companies made a killing for decades by controlling the distribution channels, forcing people on both ends of the equation to be beholden to them. Now they're not needed anymore. The artist can create and then for very little marginal cost distribute 1, 10, 10,000 copies. All that remains is to decide how to compensate the artist for the original creative act.
"but if you are that brilliant, imagine how much your peers would benefit from having you around more often to pick your brain?"
Ok, let's postulate I'm some brilliant guy that can work from home but I've been asked to work from the office so I can also mentor the three noobs on my team. Let's say those noobs will each ask me a question, on average, once every two hours. Each question will take on average 10 minutes to satisfactorily explain. So those who can benefit from my experience are only taking 30 minutes out of every 120, right?
But what about those studies that show that it takes around 20 minutes to get up to speed after each interruption? No those three noobs are eating 90 minutes out of every 120. And you can bet the local chatty Kathy will interrupt me a couple times a day, my boss will poke his head in "for just a sec" to ask me a question, so on and so forth.
Now, just because I've been asked to make myself available to these three noobs to answer their questions at the office, I have essentially zero productive time each day.
So they're paying me "brilliant guy" salary and getting next to no work out of me.
While I'm not the brilliant guy mentioned in this example, the lead dev on the project I'm QA for is. And tasks that are his alone because they involve time-sensitive changes to deep architecture are consistently late because he's consulted on more or less everything that happens on this project so he has very little time left over to put his head down and work - except on the days he gives up and telecommutes.
I remember when we used to use this strip in our training materials for new Testers to impress upon them how badly they did NOT want to have a comic like this made about a bug THEY missed.
I installed gusty on my wife's old computer that we recently replaced as a way to play with linux, use it to rip my CD collection to MP3, file server, etc etc etc....
An yet, when my login screen got stuck in an unusable state due to video settings going haywire (I never know what video modes are going to be available to me from one reboot to the next - even thought it's a fresh install of Gutsy on a relatively decent computer with a Radeon 9600) I had to use a second computer to go hit google and find out how to switch to TTY2, manually (from the CLI) kick off that reconfigure and reboot.
Moral of the story? Still had to use CLI. In windows XP land it would've been hit the reset button, have windows come up during the next reboot with a nice little text menu offering me the choice of booting normally or booting in safe mode, booting in safe mode and fixing the problem.
Summary takes one small point from interview and excludes the rest of the interview, most of which was much more interesting. Particularly the questions about the lack of new characters/franchises in the launch lineup and Miyamoto's response.
I think the main point of the article (and thus the summary headline) should've been "Nintendo still focused on fun" - Miyamoto stressed that they worry about making the games fun before focusing on a target market - because as every runaway success in the videogame industry has shown:
If it's fun and interesting, it's going to transcend the boundaries of any target market (e.g. GTA, Sims, Wii)
Not to mention the mouse we used to call "Richard Mouse" back in the day (about 10 years ago) when I was just getting my start in the gaming industry and the place I worked bought an "ergonomic" mouse that operated on these principles so we could test it with our game.
Not necessarily true. Hacking can get you a long way, but eventually it usually breaks down.
Case Study: A game I was part of the dev team for held an online, sponsored tournament. The four finalists were flown to Hawaii where they competed head to head on rigs provided by the company for the championship. One of the final four had been playing phenominally online, yet once he got to Hawaii, his game fell completely apart. He complained endlessly about how the computer he was playing on was different from what he was used to at home. Yet the other three players didn't complain at all. This guy got completely, embarassingly destroyed in the finals. And we eventually patched the hole he'd used to cheat his way to the finals.
But don't miss the fact that only 1 out of the 4 finalists was a cheater (I believe first place won $50,000 with a shot at a million-dollar challenge). The other three were simply legitimately good players.
Having been in a similar position (not for an MMO, but I was in charge of Community Relations for the dev team of a popular game for a while) I can say that the way you sleep at night is by having a firm grasp of the fact that the vocal idiots you so succinctly described constitute 2% or less of your player-base. So while the vocal minority can be used as a quick sounding-board, 90% of what goes on is soundly ignored.
As a CR,L (Community Rep, Lead), I wasn't interested in individual rantings. I was more interested in overall treands and I came to quickly recognize the vociferous trolls who could be counted on to argue, insult, demean, etc, no matter what we said. Then there were the players who were actively posting and could generally be counted on to give a reasonable description of their opinion without resorting to grade-school-bully vocabulary. And finally there were the gems of our online community - the fine few who could be counted on to provide insightful and well-reasoned responses to whatever we posted. Those all wound up on my "watch closely" list and I tended to let them lead the charge in debates to whatever our latest announcement was and if they were doing a good job, I'd just provide backup.
There were lots of posts where I was treated in "shoot the messenger" fashion. LOTS of posts. Yet I never lost a single wink of sleep over them. I had better things to worry about.
Thankfully our game catered to a crowd that tended more to the "mature" end of things, so the concentration of Leet-speaking retards was less than it could have been. I wasn't in charge of Dev efforts, I didn't even really have a huge say in what they were doing. I just got to tell the Devs what the forums were saying and report the actions of the Devs to the forums.
Funny thing is, it's been almost 4 years now, and I don't know that I could name any of the truely troglodytic denizens of the forums. But I still remember the handful that displayed above-average class in their dealings with me and with each other.
Having worked on a major game title that gave users the tools to build content some 6 years ago, I can honestly say that like most everything else about today's internet and it's "user-generated" content (blogs, photobucket, etc): the ratio of quality to utter crap is so low that the signal is almost completely lost in the noise.
We did get one or two gems that were good enough we compensated the author in some fashion and made them official. There were a slew of others that we unofficially reccommended. But the vast majority of it was either total newbs goofing around with the tools, learning projects by the more serious designers, or deliberate crap by the kinds of people that find such things funny.
So if a publisher relies on user-created content to sell a title (like, oh, say, the original Neverwinter Nights), they need to have enough in place to start with to make it worth plunking money down on for the first wave of users. If they don't have enough content to hold people's interest while the designers learn the tools, the community never reaches a big enough size to produce enough worthwhile content to generate a steady stream of interest and the game is doomed to niche status or worse.
In the case of Neverwinter Nights, they had enough to get the ball rolling and the community designers had enough time to learn the tools and start turning out some good content before interest in the game completely faded away.
But the history of games is littered with the countless discarded husks of those who tried this path and failed.
Because DOWNLOAD and INSTALL are two words that make too many users pass out upon hearing them uttered. If an IT Department is doing both of these tasks on their behalf, they too faint when they have 1,000+ users.
And yet with minimal effort, we just changed the major desktop app we develop to be "install once on the server,
create a shortcut on any and all client machines and away you go. And it's still only a single point of
maintenance for upgrades, patches, etc...
I spent 8 years in the video game industry and eventually wound up as one of two guys in the studio responsible for Copy Protection. I got the dubious honor of dealing with the tools to make sure all our CDs had our chosen form of copy protection "working".
At no point did I think the copy protection was worth the time and money we spent on it. The members of management I talked to about it weren't convinced that it was worth it either. But there was just enough anecdotal "evidence" of pirates completely eviscerating sales of games that shipped without copy protection that management was terrified to try and ship without it.
Next time you hear the **AA's going on about how piracy is killing them, realize that they may be targetting those who make decisions about including DRM just as much, or possibly more, than they're targetting the lawmakers or joe public.
In my 8 years in the video game industry (1995 - 2003) minimum requirements were always a tricky issue all-around. The first company I worked for (R.I.P. Access Software Inc.) had a habit of pushing the limit of hardware - forcing customers to upgrade to play the newest version of the game. Since I started in Tech Support, I got to hear a surprisingly large number of calls from 80-year old farts who had heard we were coming out with a new version of Links (golf game) and wondering what they needed to buy to run it.
A couple of years later as a tester with a very large publisher, I got stuck with the job of verifying (and helping to set) minimum specs. The marketing guys had all kinds of statistics on average machine and how doubling the minimum RAM reduced our target market by X%, etc etc etc
Very rarely did any technology less than 3 years old even figure into the discussion on what the minimum hardware was that we absolutely HAD to support to have a chance of selling enough games to keep the studio afloat. And there was a lot of pushback from the developers to try and add any technology (rendering, sound, etc) that wasn't supported on the minimum machine just because that meant there was all kinds of complexity involved (essentially they wound up writing two complete, parallel games - Software Renderers vs. Hardware Renderers for 3d is one fine example)
MS has lined up a couple of high-profile "exclusives" to try and hype gaming on Vista. But I'd be willing to bet that most video game developers/publishers are going to continue to target WinXP/2k users for years to come, simply to maximize their market.
"If you want to help their education send them books."
Isn't something like OLPC the perfect medium for distributing books? Instead of one book in that volume of space, dump hundreds or thousands on it. Suddenly distributing useful books to the world becomes much easier.
People go on about how useless these would be to the average third world person. But combined with some basic education and the proper set of software, these could be the most incredibly useful things concieved of. Health problems? Pull up the medical journals/textbooks stored on the OLPC. Agricultural Problems? Pull up information on farming, wells, animal husbandry, etc.
The way PopSci described the laptops, they're low power tools that don't share a whole awful lot in common with what your average slashgeek thinks of when you say the word "laptop". But as the parent poster alluded to, they make an absolutely perfect way to get useful information to the third world in a very widespread way.
And I don't think mass audience interactive entertainment (a.k.a. Video Games) will cross into truly disturbing Territory anytime soon. There's a difference between being a passive observer to something disturbing such as all the many movies already mention and being an active participant. And I think that the mental and emotional consequences of crossing that line are going to be too high for the majority of people to accept.
Granted, there's games out there with downright creepy premise, but they don't tackle such socially disturbing topics as movies because movies don't require that you project yourself as an active participant. The mental and emotional toll required to do that would, I think, force 99%+ of people to abandon such a game only a few minutes in.
"And if you start using OO, you might as well use Linux/BSD/Other free OS."
Except in these cases, the schools don't have the IT Budget to retrain all the Teachers and Administrative personnel to use Linux. Let's face it, Linux isn't going to work gracefully on the mish-mash of computers the average school computer lab has (at least in my experience).
OOo has come a long way, and I no longer have any reservations about recommending it to people who come to me asking what the best way to "get office" is.
Slashdot Mirror
"Why in the 21st century should we suddenly expect art to be free?"
Because all of a sudden in the 21st century the costs of reproducing said art has dropped to zero (well, as close to zero as you're likely to ever see). So once the artist has been compensated for the initial act of creativity, there's nothing left to pay for.
The record companies made a killing for decades by controlling the distribution channels, forcing people on both ends of the equation to be beholden to them. Now they're not needed anymore. The artist can create and then for very little marginal cost distribute 1, 10, 10,000 copies. All that remains is to decide how to compensate the artist for the original creative act.
"but if you are that brilliant, imagine how much your peers would benefit from having you around more often to pick your brain?" Ok, let's postulate I'm some brilliant guy that can work from home but I've been asked to work from the office so I can also mentor the three noobs on my team. Let's say those noobs will each ask me a question, on average, once every two hours. Each question will take on average 10 minutes to satisfactorily explain. So those who can benefit from my experience are only taking 30 minutes out of every 120, right? But what about those studies that show that it takes around 20 minutes to get up to speed after each interruption? No those three noobs are eating 90 minutes out of every 120. And you can bet the local chatty Kathy will interrupt me a couple times a day, my boss will poke his head in "for just a sec" to ask me a question, so on and so forth. Now, just because I've been asked to make myself available to these three noobs to answer their questions at the office, I have essentially zero productive time each day. So they're paying me "brilliant guy" salary and getting next to no work out of me. While I'm not the brilliant guy mentioned in this example, the lead dev on the project I'm QA for is. And tasks that are his alone because they involve time-sensitive changes to deep architecture are consistently late because he's consulted on more or less everything that happens on this project so he has very little time left over to put his head down and work - except on the days he gives up and telecommutes.
From way back in 1999 with good ol' Myth II;
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/01/06
I remember when we used to use this strip in our training materials for new Testers to impress upon them how badly they did NOT want to have a comic like this made about a bug THEY missed.
"Having a separate company run fiber that various competing companies can plug into"
What, you mean like Utopia? (utopianet.org) Municipal Fiber system with competeing ISPs all available over the same fiber.
I installed gusty on my wife's old computer that we recently replaced as a way to play with linux, use it to rip my CD collection to MP3, file server, etc etc etc....
An yet, when my login screen got stuck in an unusable state due to video settings going haywire (I never know what video modes are going to be available to me from one reboot to the next - even thought it's a fresh install of Gutsy on a relatively decent computer with a Radeon 9600) I had to use a second computer to go hit google and find out how to switch to TTY2, manually (from the CLI) kick off that reconfigure and reboot.
Moral of the story? Still had to use CLI. In windows XP land it would've been hit the reset button, have windows come up during the next reboot with a nice little text menu offering me the choice of booting normally or booting in safe mode, booting in safe mode and fixing the problem.
Summary takes one small point from interview and excludes the rest of the interview, most of which was much more interesting. Particularly the questions about the lack of new characters/franchises in the launch lineup and Miyamoto's response.
I think the main point of the article (and thus the summary headline) should've been "Nintendo still focused on fun" - Miyamoto stressed that they worry about making the games fun before focusing on a target market - because as every runaway success in the videogame industry has shown:
If it's fun and interesting, it's going to transcend the boundaries of any target market (e.g. GTA, Sims, Wii)
Like these:
http://www.ergo-items.com/3m_ergonomic_mouse.htm
http://www.ergo-items.com/quillMouse.htm
http://www.ergo-items.com/zero_tension_mouse.htm
Not to mention the mouse we used to call "Richard Mouse" back in the day (about 10 years ago) when I was just getting my start in the gaming industry and the place I worked bought an "ergonomic" mouse that operated on these principles so we could test it with our game.
Not necessarily true. Hacking can get you a long way, but eventually it usually breaks down.
Case Study: A game I was part of the dev team for held an online, sponsored tournament. The four finalists were flown to Hawaii where they competed head to head on rigs provided by the company for the championship. One of the final four had been playing phenominally online, yet once he got to Hawaii, his game fell completely apart. He complained endlessly about how the computer he was playing on was different from what he was used to at home. Yet the other three players didn't complain at all. This guy got completely, embarassingly destroyed in the finals. And we eventually patched the hole he'd used to cheat his way to the finals.
But don't miss the fact that only 1 out of the 4 finalists was a cheater (I believe first place won $50,000 with a shot at a million-dollar challenge). The other three were simply legitimately good players.
Having been in a similar position (not for an MMO, but I was in charge of Community Relations for the dev team of a popular game for a while) I can say that the way you sleep at night is by having a firm grasp of the fact that the vocal idiots you so succinctly described constitute 2% or less of your player-base. So while the vocal minority can be used as a quick sounding-board, 90% of what goes on is soundly ignored.
As a CR,L (Community Rep, Lead), I wasn't interested in individual rantings. I was more interested in overall treands and I came to quickly recognize the vociferous trolls who could be counted on to argue, insult, demean, etc, no matter what we said. Then there were the players who were actively posting and could generally be counted on to give a reasonable description of their opinion without resorting to grade-school-bully vocabulary. And finally there were the gems of our online community - the fine few who could be counted on to provide insightful and well-reasoned responses to whatever we posted. Those all wound up on my "watch closely" list and I tended to let them lead the charge in debates to whatever our latest announcement was and if they were doing a good job, I'd just provide backup.
There were lots of posts where I was treated in "shoot the messenger" fashion. LOTS of posts. Yet I never lost a single wink of sleep over them. I had better things to worry about.
Thankfully our game catered to a crowd that tended more to the "mature" end of things, so the concentration of Leet-speaking retards was less than it could have been. I wasn't in charge of Dev efforts, I didn't even really have a huge say in what they were doing. I just got to tell the Devs what the forums were saying and report the actions of the Devs to the forums.
Funny thing is, it's been almost 4 years now, and I don't know that I could name any of the truely troglodytic denizens of the forums. But I still remember the handful that displayed above-average class in their dealings with me and with each other.
</ramble>
Having worked on a major game title that gave users the tools to build content some 6 years ago, I can honestly say that like most everything else about today's internet and it's "user-generated" content (blogs, photobucket, etc): the ratio of quality to utter crap is so low that the signal is almost completely lost in the noise.
We did get one or two gems that were good enough we compensated the author in some fashion and made them official. There were a slew of others that we unofficially reccommended. But the vast majority of it was either total newbs goofing around with the tools, learning projects by the more serious designers, or deliberate crap by the kinds of people that find such things funny.
So if a publisher relies on user-created content to sell a title (like, oh, say, the original Neverwinter Nights), they need to have enough in place to start with to make it worth plunking money down on for the first wave of users. If they don't have enough content to hold people's interest while the designers learn the tools, the community never reaches a big enough size to produce enough worthwhile content to generate a steady stream of interest and the game is doomed to niche status or worse.
In the case of Neverwinter Nights, they had enough to get the ball rolling and the community designers had enough time to learn the tools and start turning out some good content before interest in the game completely faded away.
But the history of games is littered with the countless discarded husks of those who tried this path and failed.
And yet with minimal effort, we just changed the major desktop app we develop to be "install once on the server, create a shortcut on any and all client machines and away you go. And it's still only a single point of maintenance for upgrades, patches, etc...
"If only I had the soul of a MS marketing director..."
See, there's your mistake right there. MS marketing directors don't have Souls.
I don't remember any paint chips. But I do remember lots of "wall candy" when I was younger. Are they the same??? :)
I think you've hit the nail on the head.
I spent 8 years in the video game industry and eventually wound up as one of two guys in the studio responsible for Copy Protection. I got the dubious honor of dealing with the tools to make sure all our CDs had our chosen form of copy protection "working".
At no point did I think the copy protection was worth the time and money we spent on it. The members of management I talked to about it weren't convinced that it was worth it either. But there was just enough anecdotal "evidence" of pirates completely eviscerating sales of games that shipped without copy protection that management was terrified to try and ship without it.
Next time you hear the **AA's going on about how piracy is killing them, realize that they may be targetting those who make decisions about including DRM just as much, or possibly more, than they're targetting the lawmakers or joe public.
But prior art there is easy - simply forward a copy of any video-taped episode of Doogie Howser, M.D.
Now, finding someone who will admit to having video-taped an episode of Doogie Howser might be problematic...
In my 8 years in the video game industry (1995 - 2003) minimum requirements were always a tricky issue all-around. The first company I worked for (R.I.P. Access Software Inc.) had a habit of pushing the limit of hardware - forcing customers to upgrade to play the newest version of the game. Since I started in Tech Support, I got to hear a surprisingly large number of calls from 80-year old farts who had heard we were coming out with a new version of Links (golf game) and wondering what they needed to buy to run it.
A couple of years later as a tester with a very large publisher, I got stuck with the job of verifying (and helping to set) minimum specs. The marketing guys had all kinds of statistics on average machine and how doubling the minimum RAM reduced our target market by X%, etc etc etc
Very rarely did any technology less than 3 years old even figure into the discussion on what the minimum hardware was that we absolutely HAD to support to have a chance of selling enough games to keep the studio afloat. And there was a lot of pushback from the developers to try and add any technology (rendering, sound, etc) that wasn't supported on the minimum machine just because that meant there was all kinds of complexity involved (essentially they wound up writing two complete, parallel games - Software Renderers vs. Hardware Renderers for 3d is one fine example)
MS has lined up a couple of high-profile "exclusives" to try and hype gaming on Vista. But I'd be willing to bet that most video game developers/publishers are going to continue to target WinXP/2k users for years to come, simply to maximize their market.
"If you want to help their education send them books."
Isn't something like OLPC the perfect medium for distributing books? Instead of one book in that volume of space, dump hundreds or thousands on it. Suddenly distributing useful books to the world becomes much easier.
People go on about how useless these would be to the average third world person. But combined with some basic education and the proper set of software, these could be the most incredibly useful things concieved of. Health problems? Pull up the medical journals/textbooks stored on the OLPC. Agricultural Problems? Pull up information on farming, wells, animal husbandry, etc.
The way PopSci described the laptops, they're low power tools that don't share a whole awful lot in common with what your average slashgeek thinks of when you say the word "laptop". But as the parent poster alluded to, they make an absolutely perfect way to get useful information to the third world in a very widespread way.
Sorry, forgot the obligatory:
Frist Post!!111oneone!111!omg Ponies!!11!!And Kittens Too!111oneoneone
Should be something like: Game companies expect revenue increase as banned gold farmers buy new accounts...
Same Crap, Different Day
And I don't think mass audience interactive entertainment (a.k.a. Video Games) will cross into truly disturbing Territory anytime soon. There's a difference between being a passive observer to something disturbing such as all the many movies already mention and being an active participant. And I think that the mental and emotional consequences of crossing that line are going to be too high for the majority of people to accept.
Granted, there's games out there with downright creepy premise, but they don't tackle such socially disturbing topics as movies because movies don't require that you project yourself as an active participant. The mental and emotional toll required to do that would, I think, force 99%+ of people to abandon such a game only a few minutes in.
"And if you start using OO, you might as well use Linux/BSD/Other free OS."
Except in these cases, the schools don't have the IT Budget to retrain all the Teachers and Administrative personnel to use Linux. Let's face it, Linux isn't going to work gracefully on the mish-mash of computers the average school computer lab has (at least in my experience).
OOo has come a long way, and I no longer have any reservations about recommending it to people who come to me asking what the best way to "get office" is.
Linux itself, on the other hand...
"Are you calling Mister Simpson a liar?"
"Well, we do have this file footage of him with his pants on fire."
...Film at 11!