"A gaming platform doesn’t have to compete with iOS on its own terms, but it does have to at least match it in the areas that are relevant to gaming."
I wonder if this is true. I'd like to think that, if you're doing a game console, you don't necessarily have to match Apple at "ownership experience". Like, you can maybe make up for that by putting, say, buttons, on your console. Or Pokeymans.
"The context is that I had rented a herd of goats for reasons that aren’t relevant here and had sent out a mass e-mail with photographs of the goats attached to illustrate that a) I had goats, and b) it was good."
My impression is that it tends to be more about reaching out to women and making sure they know they're welcome and less about inviting women because they are women. (Like, putting some effort into making women submit talks to your conference and then treating their submissions like all other submissions.)
That makes sense if you suspect that other people spend a lot of time making women feel unwelcome and that you're going to miss out on some great talks if you don't do anything about it. I don't think it is always unreasonable to suspect something like that.
Maybe if it's only about getting some bug fixed as soon as possible. But I'd say communicating the "MongoDB is terrible" part of it to the public is pretty valuable too. Because nice to know and the hype doesn't mention that so much.
I'm sure we can come up with a best way to go about things. I'm not really cool with the "oh Mike" part of it. But I think it's mostly okayish. Certainly a lot more okay than the bug.
"(how many people you think really empathize with you - vs. just going through the motions?)"
I don't know that I prefer people going through the motions of hating on each other. It's not necessarily honest and genuine just because it's unpleasant.
On SimCity and that, Will Wright tends to think of his creations as toys rather than games.
'hell even some BluRay menus could be described as having "gameply."'
Which should be a pretty sure sign that "can be described as having gameplay" isn't that meaningful.
(The problem with arguing semantics on the internet is that everyone starts obsessing about technicalities. Quake, SimCity, Minecraft and Blu-ray menus, all qualify as technically being games. And so technically qualifying as being a game is clearly irrelevant to anything interesting. It is obviously not what people usually mean by "is it a game?" and such.)
"People arguing that piracy is ruining gamedev routinely ignore the fact that those who pirate don't necessarily have the means to buy many games; their choice is purely between pirating and not playing."
Yeah. It's like these guys totally don't get that there are "individuals who either can’t make a legal purchase because of payment-issues or who genuinely cannot afford the game."
(I like _why and I don't have any problem with the attention he receives or anything. But I did kind of agree with some of the "that's rubbish" responses to the "first" stuff.)
I'm reasonably sure I won't agree with you on any definition of art. But, uh, here's some stuff. I may-or-may-not think of some of it as art. I do think it's stuff that keeps the coding world from being some dreadful place of "craftsmanship" and "professionalism" and things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra
"One of Dijkstra's sidelines was serving as Chairman of the Board of the fictional Mathematics Inc., a company that he imagined having commercialized the production of mathematical theorems in the same way that software companies had commercialized the production of computer programs. He invented a number of activities and challenges of Mathematics Inc. and documented them in several papers in the EWD series."
Also obfuscated code and some esolang stuff, I guess.
I remember some competition that was about creating and hiding some bug that did some particular thing in code that appeared to do something else, in a way that seemed (if discovered) like it was a mistake. That was cute.
Usually when someone writes a piece on taking gaming seriously, I get the impression that the author does not take gaming very seriously, finds some other issues to be pretty serious, and thinks that to take gaming seriously is a matter of relating it to those issues.
Usually those other issues are mostly things I don't take very seriously. So it kind of comes off like the opposite. Like people should take rocket jumps and knight forks less seriously, and politics and morals and some faff more seriously.
I wonder if this is true. I'd like to think that, if you're doing a game console, you don't necessarily have to match Apple at "ownership experience". Like, you can maybe make up for that by putting, say, buttons, on your console. Or Pokeymans.