[MUD-Dev] Is database access a bottleneck?

[Ted L. Chen]

Robert Zubek

> As they say, the best way to transfer knowledge from academia is
> not via publications or conferences, but by having people with
> advanced degrees go work in the industry, bringing their practical
> problem-solving skills with them. This, however, has not been
> happening quite so much with games. Some of this is definitely due
> to the novelty of the collaboration. While there are quite a few
> academic groups interested in game AI problems, for example, these
> programs are too recent to have produced more than a handful of
> graduates. But unfortunately, even after those people graduate,
> chances are pretty good that they won't go into the industry,
> simply because it isn't competitive enough. Tenure-track positions
> tend to make much better economic and career sense than game
> development (in the general case, though there are a few notable
> exceptions). How to encourage people to go into the industry
> instead?

As a transplant from the aerospace research industry currently
trying to get in, I'd have guess say that the first barrier is the
"A minimum of xx years experience in the game industry" requirement
in a majority of job advertisements that scares off most people.  I
know (or am hoping) that it's just something HR puts on the ads for
the sake of tradition.  But if you've been spending the past 6 years
of your life getting that advanced degree, you know you don't have
the type of experience clearly stipulated in the ad.

Add to that the fact that you realize you'll be getting paid less
than half what you normally would in the more traditional industries
if you do happen to get in... well the 'option' of a game-track just
flies out the window unless you're really serious about it.
Besides, if you truely are serious, chances are good you would have
tried going in before spending 6 years for an extra degree.  I doubt
that there are really that many people who are in the overlap area
where they want to go into games as a career, but who also wanted to
spend the extra time in academia learning.

> I sympathize with the sentiment. Academic AI solutions have a
> history of being inapplicable to commercial development,
> especially in highly resource-constrained domains like games. But
> the reality of research world is that projects follow funding, not
> the other way around, and have to match the needs of the
> funder. If a gov't agency creates a research program in - whom
> shall we pick on? - action planning systems for autonomous
> military vehicles, then it's no wonder the resulting work doesn't
> bother about trying to fit into the memory space of a PSOne. :)

I'd go as far and say that in the research world, your
resource-constrained in terms of programmers.  A good deal of it is
done by graduate students and research assistants who are hired
primarily for their academic abilities, not their programming.  As
such, programming ability varies greatly and you'd want to keep your
research code as simple / general as possible.  If your prime coder
graduates, you don't want to have to find another academic PSOne
coder (all 2 of them) to draw out that elegantly optimized code ;)

TLC


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