[MUD-Dev] Is database access a bottleneck?

[Koster]

From: Robert Zubek

> Yes! Fortunately, things are improving. The AAAI symposia on AI
> and computer entertainment have done wonders to make AI
> researchers conscious of the needs of the industry, and they've
> triggered a lot of interesting game-related work. I'd be curious
> to find out if a similar thing happens the other way around - has
> the industry been influenced at all by contact with academia?

I think there's definitely a specific group of game developers that
has been. Will Wright is basically an academic transplanted. So is
Warren Spector. Harvey Smith. So, for that matter, am I. The
"Looking Glass crowd" as they sometimes get called--Doug Church, of
course. It tends to be fairly rare in design, though. Many AI folks
I know are heavily into the AAAI crowd, and certainly there's no
shortage of graphics people into the SIGGRAPH crowd.

That said, there still is very much an industry sense that academic
solutions aren't practical, and that hires from academia tend to be
poor at deadlines, and so on. You often hear the statement, "he's
good, but he's not a GAME programmer like SoNSo is..." which
generally means "he's not someone willing to get the game done in
the way that leads to the most fun rather than chasing the
theoretical optimal way to do it." It's a tricky balance because at
the same time there is a growing disdain for "hackers."

-Raph

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