This year's AIIDE (Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment) conference seems to have been quite the show. We're fortunate that around the web some very fine people have gone to the trouble to document what happened in detail and with keen insight (Andrew Stern: [1], Michael Mateus: [2], Robin Hunicke: [3]). Others? ... This is an attitude (deeper than that, it's a disposition) which I'd suggest is rooted in developer practice generally, and computer games developer practice specifically.
Frequent poster Lee Delarm reports that uber accountness is now available by the hour. Is XP insurance far behind? You find this all over the place: in City of Heroes, where I've been playing recently, most of the tasty, high-xp villains are found in missions that happen within buildings, and are available only to those in your team. At higher levels, "taskforces" are where the instances occur, and teams can expect to be locked away incommunicado from the rest of the world for hours. In the endgame of World of Warcraft it's pretty much all instances (or so teh ueb3r Tim Burke tells me).
We've seen various commentators decry the collapse of communities in real life, for example and most obviously Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone". Cass Sunstein took up the issue in "Republic.com" and suggested that perfect filtering and the availability of just-what-I-want on the Internet would prove socially corrosive. I thought this was nonsense, but my argument against Sunstein was that he didn't understand filters or the social/cognitive psychology that he relied on. I didn't suggest that there won't be effects from specialization of information. This is an attitude (deeper than that, it's a disposition) which I'd suggest is rooted in developer practice generally, and computer games developer practice specifically.
I took a header off my bike earlier this week, but luckily I was traveling at speed on blacktop and my face broke my fall.
I was especially struck by two things while playing with my daughter. She has really enjoyed the MMOG Toontown (and is frighteningly able to play unaided, stopped only when she absolutely has to read something in order to proceed) but recently asked me why we always have to go back and forth between all the stores carrying things for their owners whenever we get a "task". (Toontown is about as afflicted with the disease of FedEx quests as any MMOG I’ve ever seen.)
I was especially struck by two things while playing with my daughter. She has really enjoyed the MMOG Toontown (and is frighteningly able to play unaided, stopped only when she absolutely has to read something in order to proceed) but recently asked me why we always have to go back and forth between all the stores carrying things for their owners whenever we get a "task". (Toontown is about as afflicted with the disease of FedEx quests as any MMOG I’ve ever seen.)
I was especially struck by two things while playing with my daughter. She has really enjoyed the MMOG Toontown (and is frighteningly able to play unaided, stopped only when she absolutely has to read something in order to proceed) but recently asked me why we always have to go back and forth between all the stores carrying things for their owners whenever we get a "task". (Toontown is about as afflicted with the disease of FedEx quests as any MMOG I’ve ever seen.)
This is a perfect example of a code-based solution to a code-defined problem: People's moral obligations are essentially precise and monetary, and they therefore need a precise tool to manage them. (And this approach is not just applied externally; within software companies one frequently sees similar efforts to address organizational issues with precise and enumerated systems that can be, above all, measured.) Heather Kelly, one of the developers on a panel on Monday asked a great question about game development that she hoped researchers could help answer: Why does money trump everything?
This is a perfect example of a code-based solution to a code-defined problem: People's moral obligations are essentially precise and monetary, and they therefore need a precise tool to manage them. (And this approach is not just applied externally; within software companies one frequently sees similar efforts to address organizational issues with precise and enumerated systems that can be, above all, measured.) Heather Kelly, one of the developers on a panel on Monday asked a great question about game development that she hoped researchers could help answer: Why does money trump everything?
This is a perfect example of a code-based solution to a code-defined problem: People's moral obligations are essentially precise and monetary, and they therefore need a precise tool to manage them. (And this approach is not just applied externally; within software companies one frequently sees similar efforts to address organizational issues with precise and enumerated systems that can be, above all, measured.) Heather Kelly, one of the developers on a panel on Monday asked a great question about game development that she hoped researchers could help answer: Why does money trump everything?