On 11/09/2020 17:55, Nisha Susan wrote: > Hello Alaric :) > > My short stories are about all the changes Indians experiences in our > personal lives over the last 25 years with the arrival of the internet. My > stories are set in different contexts, big cities, small towns. The title > story is set in 2001 where the internet barely figures in the lives of two > young women who spend all their time in a bar. The last story is set in > 2018 in Bangalore in the office of a fictional internet giant.
Mmm, the way technology changes people's lives is endlessly fascinating; it's something we as a species need to get better at understanding in order to design technologies to have better impacts... > What kind of things do you invent? By day, I'm usually being paid to invent computer software! I say "invent" rather than "write" as I try to focus on things where I'm making the computer do new things (which requires a lot more creativity and, thus, fun) rather than doing stuff that's been done before. In my free time I do a bit of that, combined with a smattering of electronics and mechanical engineering... I've just started a new job, but in the months between my old job that this one, I've been working on a computer game! So the way technology affects people has been close to my mind for that. There's a lot of "casual games" around right now which try to appeal to the bits of people's brains that get addicted to things so they can make money by showing people adverts, in a way that I find quite reprehensible. On the other hand, I want to make my game engaging and not something that people will get bored of - so where's the line between making it *interesting* and *fun*, versus making it *addictive*? I'd like the game to be able to make money (although my main goal is fun for myself and the players, I can create more fun for us all if the game makes enough money that I don't need to have a day job any more!), but how can I structure that so that my incentives are still aligned with the players, rather than turning them into the product? I have a long-standing distaste for ad-funded services - see https://www.snell-pym.org.uk/archives/2018/04/22/dont-fund-your-online-business-with-advertising-itll-only-make-everyone-hate-you/ for the full rant on that - so I am drawn towards the model where anyone can play the game for free, but people who pay a monthly subscription (£5? £10?) get some purely stylistic perks. This means: - Paying money doesn't make you "better" at the game, so you're not driven to "pay to win" - As it's a monthly sub, you can't spend any more than that unless you sign up multiple accounts, which I'm designing the game to give you no in-game advantages for so doing. - The perks are still fun, so players who can afford it will be motivated to do so. However, computer games are perhaps the most user-facing thing I tend to get involved in - most of my inventing is low-level technical stuff! My specialty is systems infrastructure - programming languages, network protocols, operating systems, databases, that sort of thing. My new job is working on a mechanism for official bodies to publish registers of important stuff they're required to publish, in a way that can show clear evidence of tampering and establishes chains of trust and all that! -- Alaric Snell-Pym (2E0LOJ neé M7KIT) http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/
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