Thank you Andrew for a much more reasonable tone.
You have cleared a few items up this time around and I'll respond in
time & kind.
Claws sheathed.
On Sep 12, 2006, at 11:31 AM, Andrew Crystall wrote:
On 12 Sep 2006 at 6:38, Gibson Jonathan wrote:
Face it: If your making games you've forgotten more computer
technology
than regular folk will ever know exists. Assuming this isn't your
first game job.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with the *attitude* a person takes
towards technology!
I'm in games because I'm interested in telling a story, games happen
to be the medium. I also write short stories. (And yes, if you're
interested I would post a spare one to the list).
Technology *itself* has no interest to me, just its uses.
Of course. Wonderful motivation.
Which has nothing to do with how the bus driver or cook would view your
work, which was my own point. Or did you even notice in your haste?
It begs the question: Why are you ashamed of having technical
knowledge?
Isn't it just another hat you can wear?
Why do you have a problem with the fact that some people who can use
technology don't view it as sacred?
What, no answer, again?!?
Anyway, I don't worship at any alter. Why do you insist I do?
I grew up in a dirt floor cabin in the woods. I live exceedingly
simple and spend little - exactly as I did when I was a more
high-flying {so to speak} entrepreneur back when we had a proper
economy. I love tools and can't imagine living without them. It
started with a pencil and paper for drawing and has evolved ever-so
much since then. I guess that makes me a snob all right, because I
don't want to live in a cave.
I do appreciate simpler living and getting things back to basics. I
work hard to remove all EM and RF from my environment as well as the
numerous chemical agents our tech tools are made from and exude
throughout their useful life. I also believe our current
socio-economic-industrial model is congenitally flawed and the cracks
show up more and more. My wife runs a surf camp for women in Mexico
where we spend a great deal of our free time loving the utterly
low-tech fishing villages - where they only recently got more than one
phone line in. I am proud to be a pioneering contributor to Burning
Man from it's inception. I fail to see in what I've written that
dismisses these values.
I simply differ on your terms.
No, you're being rude and insulting because I'm bursting your
preconceptions.
Foolish mortal. I feel no pinprick shattering anything of the sort. I
am confirming a judgment of you as an erstwhile misanthropic sucking at
the tit of the system you clearly despise. You've rarely made any
points at all in your quest to squelch my POV. Lots of heat, not a lot
of light - until lately.
Sure, function is important, but I simply argue it's best to
have both.
Okay, so you care about it. I don't. I don't claim that anyone else
should
share my views, but don't speak for me.
Great. Good for you! Ignore my points and watch the train wreck... I
really don't care if you make the half-assed goods that get left at the
waysides of time - and rather expect it thus far. You want to make an
anti-war game, then what good is your months of toil if nobody plays it
because the christopathic Left Behind game is more usable to the
marketplace? What a foolish enterprise if your truly UN-concerned
about having an impact. If this were so I'd argue your only looking
for a paycheck and you can drop the altruism.
Of course, you may be motivated to see it fail as a chip to place on
your lifelong shoulder, proof of how a cruel world doesn't deserve your
fine works. Another excuse to use caustic words in email discussions,
that sort of thing.
Your arguing it's either-or.
No, that is YOUR argument. What I said was that I don't rate how
something looks in the criteria for if I will find something useful
or not. Sure, once I've decided to get something, if I have 2 items
which do it for the same price I'll pick the prettier. But that's
litterally the last consideration on my list.
interface the iPod success proves Ease Of Use is a term with teeth.
And interface is a pure useability issue. Thing is, my minidisk
recorder is also easy to use. So why should I spend cash on something
else? (the ability to record is, for me, required).
You are dead wrong on usability.
How is usability not in the realm of function?
What good is an el cheap-o product if nobody can figure out how to use
it?
Sure, it could be better, Sure, it could be cheaper. So what? Time
will do that.
Dream on. Future devices will have DRM lockdowns which make them
considerably less useful. Heck, iPod's do for their legal tunes and
its getting more restrictive every other update or so. To me, that's
a pure restriction on function.
Your arguing that mass market consumer component electronics will not
get cheaper?
DRM = Probably. But I run all my music through as AIFF {call me a
snob} - until I got this small 4GB Nano and there I only use my own
ripped MP3's. Someone will work around this if it becomes too onerous
and we'll all move in that direction.
let me give a little history
Guess what? I could care less, since you're rude.
What a silly little cudgel you wield since you have failed, repeatedly
failed, to address the antagonizing vocabulary you happily dispense
without regard. You may actually be intelligent, but you insist on
wearing a Troll mask through many of these missives and it undercuts
statements like the one you made above.
Your fooling nobody but yourself with this
usefulness-only mantra.
I never said I was trying to fool anyone, you're just being a fool by
assuming that I was trying to. I didn't say I was, you just went
right ahead and assumed it.
If your advocating the Rules of Andrew there at your work, then you are.
your trying to ship a frivolous,
time-sucking, distraction of a game no-less!
I'm shipping a story, in the form of a game. The medium is not the
message. Rogue Trooper, for example, is basically a paen on the
futility of war.
That sounds like an oxymoron of a game there.
You think selling a shoot'em-up is going to teach people not to
shoot'em-up? Going to peddle it to school kids and give NFR copies
away as an educational tax write-off? I think it's going to take a
VERY clever design to make a war game anti-war. Medium is the
blah-blah... putting lipstick on a chicken doesn't make it kissable and
your blissfully ignoring the conditioning a twitch-game will embed:
does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
Why not film a documentary? You could leave behind all this nasty tech
you soil yourself with daily and end your quiet promulgation of this
entire tech system. How about lending your shoulder to a grieving
refugee from a war torn area? Organize refugee relief drives. How
about making a real difference instead of fooling yourself?
Wishing you the luck you will need.
You apparently can't take criticism
Yes, I can. But you're plain insulting - you're reading again and
again things I never typed and are responding rudely to them. I
haven't seen one piece of critisism, just techno-snobbery.
I call bullshit.
I've given plenty of crit.
Whereas, you've failed utterly to address the rudeness you gladly,
gleefully, readily dispensed from the beginning of this thread. I
called you on it and I'm glad you've stopped, but your silence is
damning and makes a mockery of your finger-wagging here. I have
opinions, but I don't call you a "retard" or "blithering" as I express
them. Your hackles were raised by my observations and opinions and
your knee-jerk emotional responses are almost to the point of being
banned from this listing.
You rarely answer the questions directed to you. Your the rude boy,
son.
according to what you've offered to this conversation. I take a wider
view because I need versatile image generation & easy media
integration: found primarily on Macs since the dawn of this multimedia
era. Microsoft has been playing catchup a long time on this one.
Oh completely. And the guys on 2000AD comics, same company and next
door, *do* use Mac's. All the game dev guys use PC's, though, since
every single tool we use is written for the PC - historical inertia,
user base and the console developer tools keep it that way.
There is no choice to the matter for the game developer. It's how it
is, and you deal with it. (Ports are allready a cornered market...)
Re-iterative design cycles are there for a reason and user testing and
Okay, two things:
Firstly, game devs don't interact directly with users, in the main.
That's what publishers do, and they return reports to the dev. No,
it's not ideal but it's the publishers cash. We get new hires to play
the games
Insular.
You don't have to speak with the users, but you can't interact with
them while they are testing or you spoil the results. If your
demographic is the already the avid game player who's joined the
industry then your product seriously lacks breadth... hardly a group
that would give good feedback to a "paen on the futility of war." It
appears your dressing up another Ballet o' Bullets with notions of
socially responsible subtexts and testing on an exclusive segment of
people.
Again, bad practice overall although I understand why necessity can
move small dev groups to do this. Your management needs to insist on
the funds to test properly as part of the package - else the whole
investment falls over in a heap. Publishers ought to see the value of
the process. The landscape is littered with the decomposing product
and stale brittle code of limited-horizon developers.
allowing this Trojan beast into all reaches of our government and
business.
*laughs*
That's a case for Linux, *not* the Mac.
Agreed. Never made any other case except to point out a Mac is better
secured than PC.
Explain yourself with some clarity - if you can.
No, I've been perfectly plain. Stop making assumptions and it's quite
clear.
No, you have not. I've repeatedly asked for clarity and you slip the
smug face on.
It's called petulant in many quarters.
Surprise, this isn't a pub pissing-match.
You decided to be a tech-snob and to make assumptions, shrug, going
on the offensive about your precious Mac's superiority.
No, you decided to call me that name. Sticks and stones, and all...
Snobs maintain an air of superiority in the face of any facts and I've
certainly been willing to concede points to you that you initially
thought I was implacable over. I've educated you about my own history
enough to demonstrate a very wide array of interests and values and
this has moderated you own assumptions. I wouldn't be writing this
response if you hadn't.
My problem is your conduct displays touchy nerve on the topic and you
tend to spew vitriol at the drop of a hat.
Scratching my head wondering why you bother to hang here at all.
Because most people here are actually intelligent. You seem intent on
proving you're otherwise. If I want mindless wailing, I can go make
fun of Something Awful or Duck and Cover. Really.
AndrewC
Dawn Falcon
What an absurd non-sequitar.
I'll note that I've had you mellow your tone and start a more
productive conversation where I could have let loose with an infamously
sharp tongue that escalates our tension. I chose to de-fang the
inflammatory terms your unwilling -or- unable to defend and try get to
the issues.
So, I'm not intelligent. Back it up. Cite, please.
Or, shut your pie hole and slink away w/o answering AGAIN.
You've become boring again. Too bad.
Jonathan Gibson
www.formandfunction.com/word
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