[MUD-Dev2] [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants

[Sean Howard]

"John Buehler" <johnbue at msn.com> wrote:
> Sean Howard writes:
>> "John Buehler" <johnbue at msn.com> wrote:
>>
>> > To me, professionalism is about the rank and file worker being
>> > diligent in his work, completing it to the best of his ability.  It
>> > is a mindset. For the 1% of the population that comprises the
>> > geniuses of our society, they can work however they like.
>>
>> I find it very interesting that you make a distinction between the "rank
>> and file" employees and the "geniuses". So, professionalism is only
>> worthwhile to the stupid and uncreative? Okay, I'll give you that.
>
> We fall into that 99% group.

Tonto and The Lone Ranger are riding across the prairie, when they are
surrounded by 10,000 Comanche Indians. The Lone Ranger sets up in his
saddle, looks around and says, "Well Tonto, Looks like we're doomed!"
Tonto looks around and says "What's this 'WE' stuff, white man?" :)

>> But the problem comes from singling out that 1%, because they, more than
>> anybody, are confined and controlled by professionalism. I mean, if
>> you've got an IQ of 160, people think you should be able to arrive to
>> work on time and not take three week breaks to measure the acoustic
>> qualities of your ceiling tiles. Being a genius usually involves
>> exhibiting extremely unprofessional behavior and thought, but that
>> doesn't mean they get away with it in practice.
>
> I'm not sure of your point here.

My point, here, was that I was offended that you singled out smart people
as exceptions, because in my experience, people only say that as an escape
clause to look enlightened and stuff, when in reality, even if you had a
genius sitting right in front of you, if he was your subordinate, you
wouldn't make that exception for him. Even if you did recognize him as a
genius, you would likely keep him on a shorter leash because of these
reasons:

1) He's smart, and that smartness is valuable to the task at hand. He can
measure the acoustic qualities of his ceiling tiles on his own time, but
you've got a product to ship.

2) People see genius as inclusive, meaning that anything a genius can do,
he can also do all the stuff that non-geniuses can do as well. This means
that the expectation of professionalism applies triply so to geniuses.
Geniuses are expected to keep their genius in a box and only take it out
when they are allowed, and pretend to be normal people at every other hour
of the day.

3) Geniuses are smarter than you. That's a tough pill to swallow by any
measure, but you have to add in that they are your subordinate. This means
that they will question you and fight you on every single issue they don't
agree with, and unless you include them in the decision making, this will
be everything. Eventually, you are going to want to put your foot down and
say sit down and shut up and do what I say.

Long story short, geniuses in the work place inhabit the same netherworld
as geniuses in traditional class settings. People only make exceptions for
them when they want to play the "majority does it my way" card. It makes
them look like they are open minded when they really aren't. All the
while, you wouldn't recognize a genius if you met one and even if you did,
you'd refuse to actually make an exception on their behalf.

I should point out that I don't believe in exceptions to rules. When I
argue the worthlessness of homework, I'm not arguing on behalf of just the
gifted students. I think everyone would benefit from less to no homework.
Likewise, I think a development team that included the whole team in the
decision making process and allowed the free time for personal projects
or, perhaps, going home to see their family would benefit the entire time
- not just the geniuses. So, when I say that professionalism is overrated,
I'm not making any exceptions on who gets to act unprofessional. Instead,
I'm saying that professionalism has a time an place according to the task
at hand, of which anybody, smart or dumb, would benefit from (or from the
lack there of).

I'm not sure if that rant is off-topic or not. Sorry. Struck a nerve x12.

> This whole thing got started with Richard Bartle's observation about the
> lack of depth in MMORPGs.  I observed that spending resources on depth is
> opposed by all the resources spent on visuals.  That a garage effort
> would go nowhere on depth if they had to spend a lot of their time
> getting the visuals right.

Again, I think that visuals are but one part of a whole. If a garage team
spends a huge amount of time on visuals, it's probably because that
progress comes at the cost of progress in other areas, which may be
invisible, hard to cope with, or just plain out of scope for an amateur
team. Visuals have the advantage of being non-technical in nature and
delivering obvious progress (where as programming rarely does). So, the
project at large may be too complicated or too difficult, but progress in
visuals can still procede smoothly.

The problem with depth, as opposed to breadth, is that it requires a
greater investment of attention and skill. You can't really fake depth
(though you can stumble upon it). What ends up happening is that amateur
(and frequently professional) developers try to implement a complex
system, only to find it too complex and pare it down to it's most basic
components. So, while progress is still moving on the visual front, on the
depth front, progress is more fluid, jumping ahead, falling behind,
wavering in statis, and so on.

The artists aren't the ones creating the depth, so I don't know that it is
really fair to blame their progress on the failure of progress for the
game designers and programmers. I maintain that an amateur team could
develop a very complex, broad, and deep experience if... the design and
technical architecture was completed ahead of time. By this I mean that if
they didn't have to design the depth, they'd be able to implement it
easily, even with significant art asset requirements. What the amateur
development scene needs is more blueprints, not excouragement to focus on
one thing over another.

> Garage efforts DO make progress on depth so long as they stick with text.

I think you are on to something, but I'm not sure you exactly understand why.

It's not the text really that's doing it. It's the fact that the turn
around time on experimentation is quicker. For instance, I recently
decided to throw out the GUI for a tool I'm working on and replace it
entirely with a console. This is simply because I was spending more time
making sure my trees were working than dealing with the content those
trees were supposed to represent. The end result is that I've completely
modified the way the tool works three times over, simply because the
majority of commands were small, easy to digest and change, and self
contained.

So, working with text does not innately provide for more depth. It simply
allows for more frequent experimentation. Once you've drawn an orc in a
tutu, you will be somewhat unwilling to just throw that away and start a
new system from scratch. Likewise, you won't be willing to put in the
effort to do a new animation for that orc, just for an experiment that may
not work out. But you can erase a paragraph and rewrite it a hundred times
over with ease.

That's just graphically. As far as gameplay is concerned, going from, for
instance, a tile based map to a polygonal map is equally time consuming
and resistant to change. Changing an inventory system from a list based
system to a Diablo-like grid based system would be a project as well. Most
of the time, teams just stick to one idea because it would be too much
trouble to change it later or because they don't properly prototype and
test ideas in miniature settings before implementing them on a larger
scale.

This means that a better approach would be, garage efforts WOULD make more
progress on depth so long as they had the tools to prototype more quickly.
For instance, Unreal Tournament gives developers a robust world editor and
specialized scripting language - rather than starting from scratch, they
are starting from somewhere, and the turnaround for experimental ideas is
extremely quick. As such, there is a HUGE variety of mods with both depth
and breadth despite what you would likely consider a graphics heavy
approach.

So, it's not exactly the ease in which the graphics can be created, so
much as the turn over time for all aspects, from design, the world
prototyping, to testing, to whatever. Make going from A to B shorter
(much, much shorter) and experimentation will blossom. But if you just
focus on making B more interesting or A much shorter, you won't find the
same desired effect. Graphics have nothing to do with depth - it doesn't
add to it or take away from it. Everything has a cost of experimentation,
and the point should be to reduce that cost, not just minimize the stuff
with the greatest cost.

-- 
Sean Howard