...If it is true, as Andrew Stern suggested, that games AI has a long slog ahead of it (see comments, here): The danger is that this needy revisionism places the cart-before-the-horse: shouldn't game design be the dog that shakes the AI tail, and not the other way around. It also raises some interesting non-design problems. It looks to me as if it would discourage RMT, for example, because investments won't necessarily be seen as sufficiently long-term.
This is an argument that forms part of a chapter I've written for a volume I'm co-editing with Sandra Braman (Command Lines) that is currently under review, and there the specific example is Second Life and the challenges that the varieties of user content therein make to the multiple ideas about content held by the different teams within Linden Lab. But GDC led me to see this claim as more applicable here as well.
In November, we asked whether World of Warcraft would be the first North American million-subscriber world. Today, it is. Now I know what your reaction is right now. It's Wait a minute, wait a minute, let's not have any more of this crazy effects nonsense and let's not hear about why games are bad anymore. Only I think that's wrong on both points. The study is pretty solid. Control group, strong statistics, the works. No other possible explanations for the findings. It also raises some interesting non-design problems. It looks to me as if it would discourage RMT, for example, because investments won't necessarily be seen as sufficiently long-term. The truth is World of Warcraft Gold doesn’t HAVE to take a long time to get, especially in the higher levels.
Press release here. [Edit: link to donation site is here: American Red Cross.] In addition, Sony Online Entertainment has identified some 13,000 account-holders as being residents of the areas affected by Katrina and will secure their accounts against any time-based decay effects, until they log in again. That's not going to have a major effect on their well-being, but it certainly is a decent thing to do.
Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.
Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.
Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.
Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.
Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.
Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.