[MUD-Dev] Is database access a bottleneck?

[Richard Aihoshi aka Jonric]

At 11:21 AM 14/12/02 -0800, "Koster, Raph" <rkoster at soe.sony.com>
wrote:
> 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."

While I've encountered some developers who don't seem high on
academia, I have the impression there's somewhat more contact
happening than most people know about.  The main reason almost
certainly seems to be that not everyone talks in public about what
they do.  Just off the top of my head, I can think of guest
lecturing, actual teaching and recruiting situations that have
never, AFAIK, received mention in the media - only a handful to be
sure, but there are almost certainly more since I only learned about
these informally; i.e. the topic somehow came up without me asking.

Cheers.
Richard Aihoshi  - "Jonric"
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