Unfortunately, these researchers don't seem to understand that videogame studies are only going to draw attention if they blame video games for something horrible. "Video Games Help Soldiers Cope With Pain"? That won't do at all!
Hmmm...
Parents are being warned about the desensitizing effects of a new video game that one observer described as "a snowball massacre from hell." Chillingly, the game is already popular among trained killers.
At that point it's nothing but a computer puppet, with a programmer somewhere pulling the strings.
Turing described his original "Game" in "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Mind, Vol. Lix, No. 236 (1950). Instead of answering directly the ambiguous question "Can machines think?" Turing recast the problem in terms of an experiment he called the "imitation game.".
Ironically, that's the viewpoint marketers would love their clients to believe: "We say magic words that make people buy your product even if they have no interested in it!" Of course, if this model were accurate, heavily promoted products would never flop.
Another viewpoint is that of classical economics, which holds that everybody is a strictly rational actor, seeking to optimize their own best interests. Under this model, more targeted advertising is better, since it provides you with new information which you can then use to maximize your utility. Of course, if this model were accurate, there would never be stock market bubbles.
So maybe it's reasonable to conclude that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. People are neither sheep nor Vulcans. Under this model, I'd say targeted advertising is maybe a little better than the non-targeted kind. It makes it a little more likely that the thing I'm being sold is something I actually would want even without the advert.
I agree 100% with your advice. I'm doing something similar with video games--I bought a PS2 just about the time the PS3 was introduced, and as a long-time Mac user who recently got Boot Camp, I'm also catching up on a decade of great PC games. At this point, my gaming habit is very nearly free-- when I finish a game, I can swap it on a site like Swapshop for nothing more than the cost of postage.
I'm finding there's a major savings of time as well as money. That is, I'm not wasting time playing crap games, because by the time a game is a few years old, there's a pretty clear consensus on whether it's any good.
The downside is that, for sufficiently geeky guys (which includes me and most of my friends), videogaming replaces sports as a subject of conversation, and not being up on the latest games can interfere with your ability to smalltalk. Also, for online games, it can be harder to find servers after a game's popularity has peaked. But on the balance, it's well worth the tradeoffs.
Although it's not exactly expressed in the most friendly terms, the AC comment above makes a fair point. I was wrong about when highbrow critics started to realize that movies were a worthwhile artform. Somebody with mod points should mod it up.
I think you're right on the money about games being an emerging form, and you're right to compare games to film as well. In fact, the more you know about film, the more striking that analogy becomes. So if you'll forgive a film geek for drawing the analogy in even more detail:
When film first began, it was a widely accepted fact that it would never be an art form. To a large degree, this was because people mistook temporary technical limitations for inherent artistic ones. "Film is silent and in black and white, and theater is in color with sound. Film will therefore always be an inferior version of the stage, at best." Indeed, film was generally seen as nothing more than lowbrow entertainment for illiterates, immigrants, and other types deemed inferior by meanstream society.
But then technicians solved more and more of the technical problems--allowing filmmakers to tell longer stories, and to film in more settings--and meanwhile, filmmakers were learning more and more about the possibilities of this new art form. Even before sound and color, you were beginning to have masterpieces that were recognized as works of art. Birth of a Nation was the first one, although it seems crude (and horribly racist) by modern standards. But by the time you got to the 1920s, people were making films that can still move modern audiences. Yet it took another decade or two for highbrow literary critics to catch on to this explosion of creativity.
The comparison to games is pretty obvious, I think. Technical developments are allowing better and better visual effects, and game makers are getting more and more sophisticated about exploiting the strengths of the form and working around the weaknesses. I would say that Doom was the gaming world's equivalent of Birth of A Nation--a work of tremendous energy that synthesized a whole lot of already existing elements into something that felt new and exciting. And I would say Deus Ex and Thief were like the films of the early 1920's--one day they will be classics, but when they came out, they were still part of a particular artistic ghetto. And now videogames are catching up to the films of the late 1920's/early 1930s--they are very sophisticated, and the outside world is just beginning to wake up to their merit.
One last thought: if commercial gaming began in 1972 with Pong, then the medium is 36 years old. If commercial film began in 1896 with the Lumiere brothers, then it would have been 36 years old in 1932. Which means that videogaming is evolving right on schedule. This means we can expect the Citizen Kane of the videogame world sometime in the next five or six years...
When I wanted out of MySpace, I went in and pushed a button that said "delete account".
And how do you know that delete button really, truly deleted everything? Don't you think that MySpace has backups of their entire database somewhere? When you delete your account, do you think they go back and delete it from all the backups as well?
Facebook's explanation for why they retain the data is, basically, "People close their accounts, and then they change their minds and want them reopened, and this way, we can restore their entire account." I'm not crazy about their policy, but I actually find this explanation pretty credible. Presumably they're guessing that people who are really concerned about online privacy probably aren't going to be posting their life details to Facebook, and they're therefore more likely to lose users by deleting data than by keeping it. That guess might turn out to be wrong, but that doesn't make it evil. It sucks that you had to spend so much time clearing your tracks, but then, it would suck if your little brother deleted your account and you permanently lost access to your photos, wall posts, PMs, etc.
You're right about the mean/median/average thing. Thanks for catching that.
However, you're (most likely) wrong about the WGA including "unpaid interns" in its stats. The WGA statistics only cover WGA members; and before you can become a member, you have to have a certain amount of paid TV or film writing work.
As a labor union, the WGA has to have independently-audited reports of the membership dues it receives and what it does with those dues; it then publicly releases the report as well as submitting it to the Department of Labor. If the WGA is including anybody other than WGA members in its statistics, it is violating federal labor law, and the independent auditors who certify it are colluding in fraud.
Of course, fraud does happen, auditors do look the other way, and there have been corrupt labor unions in the past, but tbarring evidence to the contrary, I think it's safe to assume that the basic data in the WGA annual report is not fraudulent.
(Of course, once the WGA releases the data, the numbers can get pulled out of context and subjected to all sorts of technically-true-but-misleading manipulation, which leads us back to where we started.)
There has been some movement in that direction. For example, screenwriter John August recently decided to start shooting a "short-film-slash-web-pilot" on DV. Here's how he explained his decision to take production into his own hands:
The message from writers to the studios had been, "Come back, baby. We can work this out." But after the second time negotiations fell apart, the message became, "Maybe we should see other people."
I decided to start seeing other people.
And then there's StrikeTV. As StrikeTV's MySpace puts it:
It's an online "channel" featuring original video shows created by working professionals in the TV and Film Industry. These shows are self-funded and owned by their creators. Funds raised by ad revenue will go toward the Writers Guild Foundation Industry Support Fund, assisting non-WGA members, including IATSE and Teamsters affected by the strike. Strike TV videos will not be about the strike. This is a chance for writers to do what they do best - be original and tell stories.
Of course, the fact that StrikeTV's web presence is a MySpace page demonstrates that technical expertise and writing ability don't always go hand in hand. I think there will always be room for middlemen with business and technical knowledge, but I don't think the studios will ever regain the stranglehold they had on the market a decade or two ago.
I guess now the shows can go back to the same tired old bits they were rehashing before the strike forced them to get creative for the first time in years. -sigh-
Heh. I'm amused that this came from oneofthefour people to make the same Onion reference!
Yeah. As it is, those folks only make $75000 to $100000 a year. That's not much to live on.
Actually, writers' incomes are all over the place. According to the WGA's annual report, 45% of its members had no income at all in 2006. (Or, at least, no writing-related income; they may have been waiting on tables or doing something else to pay the bills.) Of those who DID work, 25% earned less than $38,740, while 5% earned more than $685,000! With such a wide disparity, you can juggle the statistics to suggest pretty much anything you want. The studios said something like "Working writers earn an average of $200,000 a year" while some writers said things like "the median income of a writer is below $5,000." I suspect both those statistics are, technically, true--notice that one is about an average while the other is about a median.
Personally, I think the most useful way of looking at a writer's salary is this: 55% of WGA members are employed in a given year, and among those who are employed in a year, the median income is about $107,000. So, with a 55% chance of earning $107,000, your expected annual income is $58,850. This is an excellent income if you are young and single. If you have kids and a mortgage, and you live in LA or NYC (two of the most expensive cities in America), then it's still a good wage, but it's not mansion-and-a-yacht level. This confirms my own experience--the WGA is basically a middle-class union, negotiating with multibillion dollar global companies.
(I know--I'm making a number of assumptions in my analysis, but I'm not a statistician and I have to simplify things a little. I'd welcome corrections from any of the numerous Slashdot readers who must be better at statistics than I am!)
So the writters get like a couple percent increase in their salaries while they lost about 1/3 of their anual income. These are writters not mathamatitions,
And based on your comment, "mathamatitions" are not "writters," either.
Actually, a lot of the people on the WGA negotiating committee are "show runners"--IE, writer/producers with a huge amount of responsibility. One of the negotiators, for example, is Carlton Cuse, one of the two guys who runs LOST; as you can imagine, you don't end up running a multi-million-dollar enterprise unless you have a lot of financial savvy.
So why would a bunch of smart people recommend a strike under these circumstances? Two main reasons.
First, writing careers can be very short-lived, and they are usually sporadic, with many periods of unemployment. (In fact, in any given year, nearly half of WGA members are unemployed.) The major issue in this strike was "residuals"--the royalties that writers get every time a TV show they wrote is broadcast, or a movie they wrote is sold. So, it's not entirely foolish to give up your 50% chance of employment this year to get a good deal on royalties that might be feeding your family for the next two decades.
Second, believe it or not, this was not strictly a selfish action. WGA members are very conscious of the fact that a lot of the stuff that makes it possible for us to earn our livings was won by previous generations of writers. Obviously a desire to have a good living is the main incentive in any business negotiation, but in the back of all our minds, we don't want to be the generation that let the studios roll back several decades of labor gains.
DISCLAIMER: I am an individual WGA member. These are just my opinions. I don't speak for the union.
If a union has a complete monopoly on a certain kind of labour, that means workers aren't free to choose which union to let them be represented by, they're not free not to join a union, and if they're not in a union, they're not allowed to do the work they want.
Actually, looking at my previous post, I was unintentionally misleading. Let me clarify:
I mentioned that NBC (for example) has agreed to only employ WGA members for its sitcoms. But what happens if they want to hire you, and you're not a WGA member? It's simple: you join the WGA. After a certain number of weeks of sitcom staff, you're required to join the WGA--and the WGA is required to take you. Basically, the only requirement for membership in the WGA is, you have to have been hired for a job under WGA jurisdiction. (There are, of course, some unions that restrict membership, and therefore stop people from taking jobs--but the WGA isn't one of them. If NBC wants to hire you, the WGA isn't going to stand in your way.)
But you're right that you aren't free not to join the WGA under those circumstances. On the other hand, if you want to write for TV but don't want to join the union, you can work for a show that's not under WGA jurisdiction. There are plenty of them. Most basic cable TV shows, most animated show, etc. The analogy I would use is: if you want to run Mac OS X, you have to buy a Macintosh. But nobody's forcing you to buy one; the worst you can accuse Apple of is, they've made OS X desirable enough that you're annoyed you can't run it on other computers. You could say Apple has a monopoly over computers that run Apple software, but I'm not sure "monopoly" is really the best word.
Similarly, the worst you can accuse the WGA of is, it's membership is talented enough that many of the best-paying and most prestigious TV shows are willing to sign an exclusive guild contract. Nobody forced NBC to give the WGA jurisdiction over its sitcoms, and nobody forces a sitcom writer to work for NBC.
Although frankly, if they want residuals in the games industry, they can get the fuck in line. Behind the programmers, artists, animators, fx guys, et al. (Same goes for the actors - fuck you! You want royalties on a performance that took you at most a week? We slaved over that game for over three years, working evenings, weekends, you name it).
I agree with you completely, but to be fair, "programmers should get royalties" does not equate to "writers should not get royalties." In Hollywood, gains earned by one creative union end up getting shared by the others; once SAG gets something, odds are that the WGA and the DGA will get it too. If there were a Game Programmer's Union, it's plausible to imagine something similar happening.
Also: the reason WGA members get residuals isn't that they asked nicely, and the producers said, "Hey, that sounds fair." The WGA had to strike to get residuals many decades ago. Eventually, the studios decided (a) they were losing more money from the strike than they'd lose by giving residuals, and (b) they couldn't find enough good non-WGA writers to break the strike, so they made a hard-nosed business decision to pay residuals.
Wwould programmers be willing to strike in order to get residuals? And is game programming such a specialized skill that the game companies would be unable to get outside labor to break the strike? (These aren't rhetorical questions--I know nothing about the structure of the game business and I'm genuinely interested in the answers.)
This way they can prevent writers from writing on games while there is a strike going on.
FYI, this is factually incorrect.
To understand why, you need to know a bit about what the WGA does. Among other things, the WGA negotiates something called the "Minimum Basic Agreement," or "MBA" for short. As the name suggests, the MBA offers a kind of minimum wage. Individual writers are free to negotiate better terms than the MBA provides, but the studios have agreed not to pay less than the MBA decrees.
Now, instead of saying "MBA," I should really say "MBAs." The WGA represents not just sitcom and drama writers but newswriters as well. Then there are the radio promo writers, the game writers, the documentary writers... As you can imagine, it would be somewhat futile to try to negotiate one big contract that would cover all those kinds of writing. So the WGA has negotiated different contracts for different kinds of writing.
Recently, one of those contracts expired--specifically, the contract that covers the writers of motion pictures, sitcoms, and TV dramas. Since the WGA and the studios weren't able to negotiate a replacement contract, those writers went on strike. But you'll notice that the newswriters, the radio promo writers, etc, are still working. In fact, under federal labor law, I believe it would be illegal for those writers to strike over somebody else's contract.
So... as a matter of practice and of federal law... game writers can't and wouldn't join the current strike.
I don't understand what they mean by jurisdiction here. Surely the WGA isn't a law enforcement organisation? It's just a union, right? Aren't writers, be they for TV series, animation or games, free to choose their own union to represent them? How can the alliance stop writers from choosing their own union? How can the WGA demand jurisdiction over them?
As I understand it, the WGA has an exclusive deal with the members of the AMPTP (the producers' alliance) in certain areas. For example, NBC has agreed that that they will only broadcast sitcoms written by WGA members; United Artists has agreed that all their live-action movies will be written by WGA members; etc. This is what people mean when they say "the WGA has jurisdiction" over NBC sitcoms and UA movies.
In certain other areas, there is no exclusive deal, and it's up to the writing staff to choose whether to go WGA or not. For example, for a variety of historical reasons, animated TV series and Comedy Central shows are not automatically under WGA jurisdiction, so the writers of The Simpsons, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report weren't initially under WGA jurisdiction. (The writing staffs on all three of those shows ended up voting to go WGA.)
Right now, reality television is not automatically under WGA jurisdiction. (We all know that at least some "reality" shows are written, right?) Individual reality show staffs can vote to join the WGA, but the WGA wants the AMPTP to enter into an agreement that would cover all reality shows, just like the one covering all sitcoms. This is what people mean when they say the WGA wants jurisdiction over reality TV.
DISCLAIMER: I am a WGA member but I don't speak for the WGA.
Actually, TFA isn't just advising you to look at (and copy) the mechanics of games. Like TFA's title says, it's about "Playing to Learn."
In addition to the mechanics of the game, TFA advises paying attention to:
--Start Screen and Options. Do they help you get a feel for the game before you even start playing? Are they creatively and consistently done?
--The opening scene. How does it establish the world of the game? How does it segue into the gameplay?
--Basic movement.
--Camera control.
--Pacing and interest curve. Does the game ramp up the intensity and interest in a good way?
--"Math." This is a bit confusing, but I think the author is talking about thing like AI decision paths.
--Backstory. How is the game affected by the constraints of the system its running on? How is it affected by its development history?
In other words, TFA is actually agreeing with your point that "What makes a game good, a game well designed, is that the mechanics are used and interchanged in interesting ways that create depth and the ability for a person to feel unique in the game and yet still powerful or useful. And also how the art direction melds with those mechanics. And how polished they are. And the story."
You're assuming that they're visiting all restaurants which just isn't true. If they visit an establishment that's poor then they should get equal press time than a good one does. They've already visited it, usually more than twice -- especially if it was a poor experience, why not write about it and save the rest of us the time?
No, I'm assuming that there is a finite number of column inches devoted to reviews, which means reviews are a zero sum game. Every review you publish of a bad restaurant means one fewer review of a good restaurant. So you as a reviewer (or an editor) you have to ask yourself, "What helps my readers more?"
True, if you were going to go to Restaurant X, and you see a bad review of it, you've been saved some time. But with 20,000 restaurants in New York, the odds that a negative review will happen to be about a restaurant you were going to go to are pretty low. (The exception is if there's a really overrated restaurant; in that case, knowing it's overrated can be very helpful.) Of course, the fewer restaurants a city (or town) has, the more useful bad reviews become--but unless a newspaper can really hope to review every restaurant in town over the course of a year, good reviews are still going to be more helpful.
I swear, I'm not making this up--I used to work at a magazine where I shared an office with the food critic. Maybe the choice was more stark there, since it was a monthly magazine and he was really limited in the number of reviews he could get into print each month--but the principle is the same.
I don't even think it goes that far. I know plenty of restaurant reviewers for news print magazines that refuse to have their poor experiences published. Only the good restaurants (according to their opinions) get exposure and the others don't get jack. It's disappointing that our media culture is full of a bunch of pansy motherfuckers who are afraid to say exactly what they think.
This isn't necessarily a sign of cowardice. Think about the numbers for a moment. I've read that there are about 20,000 restaurants in New York City, but as a reviewer, you have a limited amount of space. If you use that space to tell your readers about one restaurant they should not go to, you have narrowed down their choices by.005%. If, by contrast, you tell your readers about one restaurant they should go to, you have narrowed down their choices by 99.995%.
Which is a more useful service to your reader?
(Obviously New York has more restaurants than your average town, but the principle applies in any city where there are more restaurants than you can possibly review.)
He claims that Leopard drops packets and loses connections. I have a bunch of Leopard machines on both wired and wireless networks and have seen absolutely no evidence that this is true.
Well, if we're just swapping anecdotal evidence, my wireless network connection has been a nightmare in Leopard, to the point where I am now using an external wireless router rather than my internal Airport card. The external router works great; the Airport card constantly drops the connection.
As the saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not "data," but for what it's worth... there's a thread on the Leopard section of the Apple support board called Airport Problem. It has 526 responses and 27,735 views, making it one of the biggest and most-viewed threads on the entire support board, which tends to suggest that this is a fairly widespread problem.
Maybe you're right, and the author of the piece, the hundreds of people posting in that thread, the thousands viewing it, and I are all "idiotic fucks] who screwed up our install," to borrow your elegant phrase.Maybe the author of TFA is right and Apple has screwed things up mamothly and Leopard is a disaster. Or maybe--and this is where I'd put my money--Leopard is neither disastrous nor flawless; it's big complicated piece of newly released software, and we all ought to have a little patience with each other while the bugs get caught and fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, these researchers don't seem to understand that videogame studies are only going to draw attention if they blame video games for something horrible. "Video Games Help Soldiers Cope With Pain"? That won't do at all!
Hmmm...
Parents are being warned about the desensitizing effects of a new video game that one observer described as "a snowball massacre from hell." Chillingly, the game is already popular among trained killers.
There we go. Much better!
That means that somewhere out there is a mugger with three eyes. He can see in 4D!
Interesting deduction. What makes you say that I will soon be seeing it on slashdot for testing.
Ironically, that's the viewpoint marketers would love their clients to believe: "We say magic words that make people buy your product even if they have no interested in it!" Of course, if this model were accurate, heavily promoted products would never flop.
Another viewpoint is that of classical economics, which holds that everybody is a strictly rational actor, seeking to optimize their own best interests. Under this model, more targeted advertising is better, since it provides you with new information which you can then use to maximize your utility. Of course, if this model were accurate, there would never be stock market bubbles.
So maybe it's reasonable to conclude that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. People are neither sheep nor Vulcans. Under this model, I'd say targeted advertising is maybe a little better than the non-targeted kind. It makes it a little more likely that the thing I'm being sold is something I actually would want even without the advert.
I agree 100% with your advice. I'm doing something similar with video games--I bought a PS2 just about the time the PS3 was introduced, and as a long-time Mac user who recently got Boot Camp, I'm also catching up on a decade of great PC games. At this point, my gaming habit is very nearly free-- when I finish a game, I can swap it on a site like Swapshop for nothing more than the cost of postage.
I'm finding there's a major savings of time as well as money. That is, I'm not wasting time playing crap games, because by the time a game is a few years old, there's a pretty clear consensus on whether it's any good.
The downside is that, for sufficiently geeky guys (which includes me and most of my friends), videogaming replaces sports as a subject of conversation, and not being up on the latest games can interfere with your ability to smalltalk. Also, for online games, it can be harder to find servers after a game's popularity has peaked. But on the balance, it's well worth the tradeoffs.
Although it's not exactly expressed in the most friendly terms, the AC comment above makes a fair point. I was wrong about when highbrow critics started to realize that movies were a worthwhile artform. Somebody with mod points should mod it up.
I think you're right on the money about games being an emerging form, and you're right to compare games to film as well. In fact, the more you know about film, the more striking that analogy becomes. So if you'll forgive a film geek for drawing the analogy in even more detail:
When film first began, it was a widely accepted fact that it would never be an art form. To a large degree, this was because people mistook temporary technical limitations for inherent artistic ones. "Film is silent and in black and white, and theater is in color with sound. Film will therefore always be an inferior version of the stage, at best." Indeed, film was generally seen as nothing more than lowbrow entertainment for illiterates, immigrants, and other types deemed inferior by meanstream society.
But then technicians solved more and more of the technical problems--allowing filmmakers to tell longer stories, and to film in more settings--and meanwhile, filmmakers were learning more and more about the possibilities of this new art form. Even before sound and color, you were beginning to have masterpieces that were recognized as works of art. Birth of a Nation was the first one, although it seems crude (and horribly racist) by modern standards. But by the time you got to the 1920s, people were making films that can still move modern audiences. Yet it took another decade or two for highbrow literary critics to catch on to this explosion of creativity.
The comparison to games is pretty obvious, I think. Technical developments are allowing better and better visual effects, and game makers are getting more and more sophisticated about exploiting the strengths of the form and working around the weaknesses. I would say that Doom was the gaming world's equivalent of Birth of A Nation--a work of tremendous energy that synthesized a whole lot of already existing elements into something that felt new and exciting. And I would say Deus Ex and Thief were like the films of the early 1920's--one day they will be classics, but when they came out, they were still part of a particular artistic ghetto. And now videogames are catching up to the films of the late 1920's/early 1930s--they are very sophisticated, and the outside world is just beginning to wake up to their merit.
One last thought: if commercial gaming began in 1972 with Pong, then the medium is 36 years old. If commercial film began in 1896 with the Lumiere brothers, then it would have been 36 years old in 1932. Which means that videogaming is evolving right on schedule. This means we can expect the Citizen Kane of the videogame world sometime in the next five or six years...
Facebook's explanation for why they retain the data is, basically, "People close their accounts, and then they change their minds and want them reopened, and this way, we can restore their entire account." I'm not crazy about their policy, but I actually find this explanation pretty credible. Presumably they're guessing that people who are really concerned about online privacy probably aren't going to be posting their life details to Facebook, and they're therefore more likely to lose users by deleting data than by keeping it. That guess might turn out to be wrong, but that doesn't make it evil. It sucks that you had to spend so much time clearing your tracks, but then, it would suck if your little brother deleted your account and you permanently lost access to your photos, wall posts, PMs, etc.
You're right about the mean/median/average thing. Thanks for catching that.
However, you're (most likely) wrong about the WGA including "unpaid interns" in its stats. The WGA statistics only cover WGA members; and before you can become a member, you have to have a certain amount of paid TV or film writing work.
As a labor union, the WGA has to have independently-audited reports of the membership dues it receives and what it does with those dues; it then publicly releases the report as well as submitting it to the Department of Labor. If the WGA is including anybody other than WGA members in its statistics, it is violating federal labor law, and the independent auditors who certify it are colluding in fraud.
Of course, fraud does happen, auditors do look the other way, and there have been corrupt labor unions in the past, but tbarring evidence to the contrary, I think it's safe to assume that the basic data in the WGA annual report is not fraudulent.
(Of course, once the WGA releases the data, the numbers can get pulled out of context and subjected to all sorts of technically-true-but-misleading manipulation, which leads us back to where we started.)
Personally, I think the most useful way of looking at a writer's salary is this: 55% of WGA members are employed in a given year, and among those who are employed in a year, the median income is about $107,000. So, with a 55% chance of earning $107,000, your expected annual income is $58,850. This is an excellent income if you are young and single. If you have kids and a mortgage, and you live in LA or NYC (two of the most expensive cities in America), then it's still a good wage, but it's not mansion-and-a-yacht level. This confirms my own experience--the WGA is basically a middle-class union, negotiating with multibillion dollar global companies.
(I know--I'm making a number of assumptions in my analysis, but I'm not a statistician and I have to simplify things a little. I'd welcome corrections from any of the numerous Slashdot readers who must be better at statistics than I am!)
And based on your comment, "mathamatitions" are not "writters," either.
Actually, a lot of the people on the WGA negotiating committee are "show runners"--IE, writer/producers with a huge amount of responsibility. One of the negotiators, for example, is Carlton Cuse, one of the two guys who runs LOST; as you can imagine, you don't end up running a multi-million-dollar enterprise unless you have a lot of financial savvy.
So why would a bunch of smart people recommend a strike under these circumstances? Two main reasons.
First, writing careers can be very short-lived, and they are usually sporadic, with many periods of unemployment. (In fact, in any given year, nearly half of WGA members are unemployed.) The major issue in this strike was "residuals"--the royalties that writers get every time a TV show they wrote is broadcast, or a movie they wrote is sold. So, it's not entirely foolish to give up your 50% chance of employment this year to get a good deal on royalties that might be feeding your family for the next two decades.
Second, believe it or not, this was not strictly a selfish action. WGA members are very conscious of the fact that a lot of the stuff that makes it possible for us to earn our livings was won by previous generations of writers. Obviously a desire to have a good living is the main incentive in any business negotiation, but in the back of all our minds, we don't want to be the generation that let the studios roll back several decades of labor gains.
DISCLAIMER: I am an individual WGA member. These are just my opinions. I don't speak for the union.
I mentioned that NBC (for example) has agreed to only employ WGA members for its sitcoms. But what happens if they want to hire you, and you're not a WGA member? It's simple: you join the WGA. After a certain number of weeks of sitcom staff, you're required to join the WGA--and the WGA is required to take you. Basically, the only requirement for membership in the WGA is, you have to have been hired for a job under WGA jurisdiction. (There are, of course, some unions that restrict membership, and therefore stop people from taking jobs--but the WGA isn't one of them. If NBC wants to hire you, the WGA isn't going to stand in your way.)
But you're right that you aren't free not to join the WGA under those circumstances. On the other hand, if you want to write for TV but don't want to join the union, you can work for a show that's not under WGA jurisdiction. There are plenty of them. Most basic cable TV shows, most animated show, etc. The analogy I would use is: if you want to run Mac OS X, you have to buy a Macintosh. But nobody's forcing you to buy one; the worst you can accuse Apple of is, they've made OS X desirable enough that you're annoyed you can't run it on other computers. You could say Apple has a monopoly over computers that run Apple software, but I'm not sure "monopoly" is really the best word.
Similarly, the worst you can accuse the WGA of is, it's membership is talented enough that many of the best-paying and most prestigious TV shows are willing to sign an exclusive guild contract. Nobody forced NBC to give the WGA jurisdiction over its sitcoms, and nobody forces a sitcom writer to work for NBC.
Also: the reason WGA members get residuals isn't that they asked nicely, and the producers said, "Hey, that sounds fair." The WGA had to strike to get residuals many decades ago. Eventually, the studios decided (a) they were losing more money from the strike than they'd lose by giving residuals, and (b) they couldn't find enough good non-WGA writers to break the strike, so they made a hard-nosed business decision to pay residuals.
Wwould programmers be willing to strike in order to get residuals? And is game programming such a specialized skill that the game companies would be unable to get outside labor to break the strike? (These aren't rhetorical questions--I know nothing about the structure of the game business and I'm genuinely interested in the answers.)
To understand why, you need to know a bit about what the WGA does. Among other things, the WGA negotiates something called the "Minimum Basic Agreement," or "MBA" for short. As the name suggests, the MBA offers a kind of minimum wage. Individual writers are free to negotiate better terms than the MBA provides, but the studios have agreed not to pay less than the MBA decrees.
Now, instead of saying "MBA," I should really say "MBAs." The WGA represents not just sitcom and drama writers but newswriters as well. Then there are the radio promo writers, the game writers, the documentary writers... As you can imagine, it would be somewhat futile to try to negotiate one big contract that would cover all those kinds of writing. So the WGA has negotiated different contracts for different kinds of writing.
Recently, one of those contracts expired--specifically, the contract that covers the writers of motion pictures, sitcoms, and TV dramas. Since the WGA and the studios weren't able to negotiate a replacement contract, those writers went on strike. But you'll notice that the newswriters, the radio promo writers, etc, are still working. In fact, under federal labor law, I believe it would be illegal for those writers to strike over somebody else's contract.
So... as a matter of practice and of federal law... game writers can't and wouldn't join the current strike.
As I understand it, the WGA has an exclusive deal with the members of the AMPTP (the producers' alliance) in certain areas. For example, NBC has agreed that that they will only broadcast sitcoms written by WGA members; United Artists has agreed that all their live-action movies will be written by WGA members; etc. This is what people mean when they say "the WGA has jurisdiction" over NBC sitcoms and UA movies.
In certain other areas, there is no exclusive deal, and it's up to the writing staff to choose whether to go WGA or not. For example, for a variety of historical reasons, animated TV series and Comedy Central shows are not automatically under WGA jurisdiction, so the writers of The Simpsons, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report weren't initially under WGA jurisdiction. (The writing staffs on all three of those shows ended up voting to go WGA.)
Right now, reality television is not automatically under WGA jurisdiction. (We all know that at least some "reality" shows are written, right?) Individual reality show staffs can vote to join the WGA, but the WGA wants the AMPTP to enter into an agreement that would cover all reality shows, just like the one covering all sitcoms. This is what people mean when they say the WGA wants jurisdiction over reality TV.
DISCLAIMER: I am a WGA member but I don't speak for the WGA.
Actually, TFA isn't just advising you to look at (and copy) the mechanics of games. Like TFA's title says, it's about "Playing to Learn."
In addition to the mechanics of the game, TFA advises paying attention to:
--Start Screen and Options. Do they help you get a feel for the game before you even start playing? Are they creatively and consistently done?
--The opening scene. How does it establish the world of the game? How does it segue into the gameplay?
--Basic movement.
--Camera control.
--Pacing and interest curve. Does the game ramp up the intensity and interest in a good way?
--"Math." This is a bit confusing, but I think the author is talking about thing like AI decision paths.
--Backstory. How is the game affected by the constraints of the system its running on? How is it affected by its development history?
In other words, TFA is actually agreeing with your point that "What makes a game good, a game well designed, is that the mechanics are used and interchanged in interesting ways that create depth and the ability for a person to feel unique in the game and yet still powerful or useful. And also how the art direction melds with those mechanics. And how polished they are. And the story."
Is it just me, or does the 1977 card look an awful lot like R2D2 is wearing a bra?
True, if you were going to go to Restaurant X, and you see a bad review of it, you've been saved some time. But with 20,000 restaurants in New York, the odds that a negative review will happen to be about a restaurant you were going to go to are pretty low. (The exception is if there's a really overrated restaurant; in that case, knowing it's overrated can be very helpful.) Of course, the fewer restaurants a city (or town) has, the more useful bad reviews become--but unless a newspaper can really hope to review every restaurant in town over the course of a year, good reviews are still going to be more helpful.
I swear, I'm not making this up--I used to work at a magazine where I shared an office with the food critic. Maybe the choice was more stark there, since it was a monthly magazine and he was really limited in the number of reviews he could get into print each month--but the principle is the same.
Which is a more useful service to your reader?
(Obviously New York has more restaurants than your average town, but the principle applies in any city where there are more restaurants than you can possibly review.)
As the saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not "data," but for what it's worth... there's a thread on the Leopard section of the Apple support board called Airport Problem. It has 526 responses and 27,735 views, making it one of the biggest and most-viewed threads on the entire support board, which tends to suggest that this is a fairly widespread problem.
Maybe you're right, and the author of the piece, the hundreds of people posting in that thread, the thousands viewing it, and I are all "idiotic fucks] who screwed up our install," to borrow your elegant phrase.Maybe the author of TFA is right and Apple has screwed things up mamothly and Leopard is a disaster. Or maybe--and this is where I'd put my money--Leopard is neither disastrous nor flawless; it's big complicated piece of newly released software, and we all ought to have a little patience with each other while the bugs get caught and fixed.