I'm writing a brief response to The Ants pick the food, the Ants eat the food, and the Grasshoppers leave, Dr. Reddy's introduction and abstract for a talk he's giving on Monday (July 11, 2011).

Who is doing the hard work, and who is swooping in at the last minute to enjoy the ill-gotten fruit of another's labor? Here's a little snippet from University of Wales, Newport's description of the Computer Games Design - BA (Honors) degree:

When you graduate from the course you are fully prepared as a creative practitioner who can really make a difference. Roles range from the traditional art positions of character and environment design concept to model, rigging and animation to level design and project management for computer games design.

Frankly, that looks very much like the university is suggesting that students will come out of the program ready for a career; one where the student can make a difference, develop games independently, etc. Academia is trying to sell students on degrees for the marketable, useful skills imparted over the course of earning the degree, and then refusing to be accountable to either the industries targeted, or the graduated student who discovers too late that they are not actually prepared for a job.

The other funny thing about this rant is the disconnect between the criticisms he perceives as being leveled at games education ("By turns it’s either too many or too few games, not enough programming, etc") and his defense (arguing that academia is not about "fitting the loyalty chips in the necks of serfs bound for indentured servitude at the nearest Triple-A studio")¹. Are the only people criticizing game development curricula at those AAA studios? Is that really their main interest in game development programs? Or is there actually a disconnect between the education offered in these programs, the promises they make, and the students coming out?

The group of people in this scenario that seem to have no accountability - that try to avoid taking responsibility for their actions - are the universities. The students certainly pay their way, the game developers are left still struggling to find, develop, or explain how someone embarks on this career path and develops along it... but the universities, well, they've got tuition and they've got another batch of students and if anyone says "you treated that last batch of students wrong" - the response is

We aren’t training sweatshops. We don’t teach skills, we teach people. Now bog off and let us do our job!

1. I'm being a bit loose with the quote; however, I think I'm accurately portraying his stance in the article, and it's really the best imagery in the article.

Sorry for the 11 days of downtime, folks. This server got hit in the rolling blackouts through Texas on the 3rd, and I haven't been able to devote time to tracking down what kept it down since. Normal service has resumed.

This post is in response to Psychochild's state-of-the-industry-style post.

Perhaps the thing he said that bothers me the most is that "we're still stuck with old DIKU gameplay." This hasn't been my experience at all, frankly. DIKU is still the thing that everyone thinks about when they're talking about big successful MMOs, but that doesn't mean they all are.

Dungeon Runners, for example, had combat elements completely distinct from the DIKU style (in particular, ranged attacks had actual paths they followed, and collision detection along that path; this meant 'twitch' gameplay had a real effect. It was a bit wonky since it was server-side, but I think it was a good step in the direction of "do something different." Was it earth-shattering innovation? Of course not, but it did impact the game, and I think it could have become a strong differentiator if other things, like the business model, hadn't let the game down. Similarly, the canceled project I still can't talk about was most definitely not a DikuMUD-style game, and my current project is somewhere off the beaten path too, with collectible card game mechanics in place of many DIKU tropes.

Only one of those three games without the same ol' DikuMUD gameplay is up (or will ever see the light of day), but Wizard101 is a pretty notable success, I think. This dovetails nicely with one of the points Brian made that I really do agree with - 2010 was a great year for free to play games. That's probably the biggest lesson I've learned so far - "free to play" may be a dirty word to some, but I think the period of time where every MMO had a mandatory subscription fee is over. Some will continue to go this route, but with the ever-crowded marketplace - particularly with competition (in terms of time spent) from Facebook-style games - games that require a financial commitment to even see have to overcome a lot more inertia, probably through significant marketing spends.

Beyond games I've personally worked on, Brian mentions RIFT quite a bit as a game that's disappointingly DIKUesque, but doesn't touch on the other game Trion Worlds is publishing - End of Nations, which is aiming for the MMORTS label - at all. There's also another studio in town working on a "massively multiplayer strategy game" that I don't know much about, but again: MMOG, not "graphical DikuMUD."

Which projects will pan out? I'm not sure, but I think I can definitely say there's ongoing innovation in online gameplay, and investment in new businesses. It's not the crazy days of yore when everyone was agog at the success of Ultima Online or EverQuest, or the moderately more mature period right after World of Warcraft launched... instead, people are paying attention to (and hoping to capitalize on) the success of Facebook and Zynga. It's a different market, but not a completely unrecognizable one. :-)

Happy 2011, everyone!

As I've said before, good UI and readable, maintainable code don't mix. But lately I've been inspired to revisit this topic, because it's an idea that has been popping up in other venues as well:

From Ars Technica, a user's perspective: The failure of Gran Turismo 5: the power of menus and UI makes it sound like Gran Turismo 5 erred on the side of code cleanliness and loose coupling in their user interface. That's an understandable tradeoff on such a large project, in development for so many years, where the main focus is on replicating physics (and in fact, creating an incredible experience on a different level), but I wonder how conscious it was. Did they have an overreaching goal to focus on code quality? Did programmers simply mark UI bugs "too hard to implement" or "working as designed"?

Programming in the 21st Century has a related take: "It's extremely difficult to be simultaneously concerned with the end-user experience of whatever it is that you're building and the architecture of the program that delivers that experience."

James is going for a larger point there, I think: Hey, we're making games. Fun games is the goal. Beautiful code is not the goal. But that's not entirely true either; for a game that is in development for several years before it launches, and may continue to be in development for years after it launches. I've spent about as much time working on live, playable games as I have on games before they launch, and as I continue on my current project it's going to become lopsided in favor of the former.

Ongoing maintenance adds different concerns, and makes code quality a much more pervasive issue. At the same time, the whole point of our programming is still to entertain, and the user interface will always play an enormous role in enabling that entertainment. (Perhaps it's no surprise that the coolest interfaces show up in movies, where real programmers don't have to try to deal with it.) Ignoring the gyrations of code to craft the perfect user experience works for a little while... and then the code hyperextends its back. Ignoring the player experience to craft the perfect code is a worse feedback cycle - soon you won't have players to abuse.

Hopefully contemplating the horrible future of our career doesn't get in the way of enjoying the holidays!

Slashdot alerted me to an odd article from last week on Taco Bell Programming. The odd thing about it, to me, is this aside about DevOps, "where system administrators start writing unit tests and other things to help the developers warm up to them...." Ted Dziuba's response is the, errr, opposite? "Taco Bell Programming is about developers knowing enough about Ops...."

Both of which sound pretty much the same to me. I've ranted about this before, but it boils down to this: we're all on the same side. Whether you are so small you don't have any dedicated sysadmins or DBAs, or so large that you've got a dedicated team of each: what you do impacts the operation of your game, and the operation of the game impacts you.

Work with other teams, get to know what they do (a good goal: know it well enough to be a useful sounding board), and keep talking to each other. If you're worried about the Operations staff poking into your development domain and swirling it around... maybe it's because there are problems, pressing to Ops but ignored by devs. Maybe you should get that fixed, and worry less about who fixed it. :-)

As for "Taco Bell Programming," or "using basic tools in surprising and clever ways:" sure, do it when it's feasible. Solve your problems simply if you can. And if you can't... well, then it's time to be a good programmer, isn't it?

I wrote an article for the IGDA Newsletter trying to better address the security concerns in MMO trade systems I discussed earlier this year; even if you read the previous blog post, I think the new one is worth reading by itself. Thanks to Scott Jennings, Peter Harkins, Ammon Lauritzen, Jeramey Crawford, and John Henderson for feedback on earlier drafts. I wasn't able to incorporate all of their feedback, but the article is better for everything I did include.

EDIT: boy is my face red, I did not include John Henderson. My apologies.

Late last year I was talking about helping the rest of the BioWare team be more productive, and I feel like I took great strides in that direction. Although I wasn't hired to work on the build system, I was tasked with making some minor improvements here and there, and I quickly realized it needed someone's full attention. By the time I left, I was able to expand the single build machine managed in spare time to a multi-platform build farm managed by a team, which is the right way to approach builds for a project of that scope.

I accomplished what I wanted - I expect to leave a lasting positive impact on the productivity of the team - and I got to work at BioWare while doing it. They're a great group of studios, and it seems like they have had a big effect on what it means (and what it's like) to work at EA. However, I came to realize that core game development was what I really wanted to be doing, and another studio was the perfect storm for me: KingsIsle Entertainment is small, but they've got a successful live game.

I like small, because it means I have more of an impact and risks are lower. However, after my time at 2K Games on a small team making a game no one will ever see, having a live game (or, admittedly, the kind of studio support that The Old Republic has) is also important to me. If it's an already successful live game? Well, that means I'm less likely to be writing this post again in a year, and I'm ready to settle down now. I started at KingsIsle yesterday, and as I get back into game dev I'll try to have more juicy posts up here. :-)