His thoughts on how definitions reflect different ways of thinking, as a human, is profound to me. The importance of communication discussed in the paper is relevant for any technical field.
Good assets can't polish turd. A solid core, however, can benefit from assets. They mention this point in the article.
A better counter argument would be a game which was completely abstract, hence not fun, being made fun with content.
So in counterstrike, if you were abstract blobs, the goal might be confusing, and not fun. But your not, you either want to blow up, or save, a building (assets assist communication.)
Good assets sold turds at the beginning of most previous console cycles. This is likely a thing of the past, in this new era of vastly diminishing visual returns for dollars spent. Hitting that top-tier of fidelity that previously was able to ship games on screenshots alone is now so hideously expensive that few publishers are willing to risk it.
If you remove all of the sounds from Minecraft, all of the textures, all of the composite models and replace them with wireframe hitboxes, I doubt you'd have something as fun as the hit title.
Prototypes are not good indicators that something could be fun.
I played a very early build of Minecraft, when Notch posted it to an IRC channel I frequented at the time. It had primitive but recognizable voxel graphics, and almost no features. But the basic principles of exploration and building were there.
I can tell you with certainty that very early and unpolished prototypes of Minecraft were fun, and that the potential was obvious. (Though of course no one could predict just how huge Minecraft became.)
That's completely false and grossly overlooks what makes games fun in the first place.
Prototypes are your absolute best indicators to determine if a project is worth investing into to reach completion or not. Because you find your fun factor at the prototype level.
You'll get at most better visuals, sounds and more balance in the game with polish. If your mechanics aren't fun to begin with, polishing them will do absolutely no good.
> I doubt you'd have something as fun as the hit title.
I doubt it too.
> Prototypes are not good indicators that something could be fun.
This is what I disagree with. The prototype won't be as fun as the final product (because otherwise, why bother polishing in the first place?).
Take Infiniminer, an obvious source of inspiration for Notch. It's only got the very minimum of features; it's kind of a Minecraft prototype. It's also got the features that originally got me into Minecraft: building arbitrary structures in a large virtual environment. Minecraft is better fleshed out, of course, but the core of the game is there.
There's going to be a point where you've got the irreducible kernel of a game concept. That is the prototype. Remove items, crafting, mobs, infinite world sizes, lighting, and textures from Minecraft, and you've still got the kernel: a virtual building kit. It's an awesome idea, fun on its own, and expandable into a "real" game with goals, achievements, etc. It's a great indicator that a fleshed-out version of the game may be fun.
Now, you can't build something smaller than a kernel of the concept, call it the prototype, and make a judgement based on that.
At the beginning, yes. The beginning alpha/demo version was. Infiniminer was like the prototype, and the demo was like the engine reimplementation when it was at the same level of development, when the previous dev team quit and deleted the original source tree (not literally true; I'm speaking figuratively).
It was a clone with aspirations of becoming something greater.
I think at some point you have to use your imagination and intuition to fill in the gaps. This is something you have to do at many stages of the process anyway right? A prototype let's you confirm that your basic ideas are sound and you can focus on imagining the other aspects that bring it all together.
You know, I suspect it's much more common to find people arguing over proper cancer treatment, because they want to believe their care is right. And if they don't like math, or science, they'll make sweeping wrong statements about their health, because they don't know how to make the right explanation feel right.
I've often felt I'm not smart enough to be a theoretical physicist, but smart enough to know the difference between a real explanation and word vomit.
And that is extremely stressful for me. There is a desire to feel like you can understand some key part of the world you live in.
Failing to get into academia feels like I've personally failed at calming this desire. And I hate it.
Sometimes I think people refuse to believe this course of life is necessary, it feels elite and exclusionary. Knowing your world shouldn't require this, it cant't.
Speaking as an academic, "getting into academia" requires some combination of luck, perseverance, and personality fit. It has very little to do with being "smart enough".
Also, you end up being a specialist in a very, very tiny aspect of the world, rather than having a lot of general knowledge. A good illustration:
I mean sure. It's just when I look at my heroes, Feynman, Polya, Dirac, etc. They all went to places like princeton.
And near as I can tell, that seems to be important. The only person I can think of who blew the door open was faraday, a spooky good experimentalist.
Granted it's rediculous to compare oneself to people like this. I'm worried I'm half depressed.
Worrying about specialization seems, to me, misleading. At least in math. People regularly use their entire experience on problems. The specialty just reflects your values and talents. I dunno, maybe I am wrong, I appreciate your thoughts.
My goal with my original post was to explain a strong desire to be "right" about things one cares about. I think this emotion is destructive, and unproductive, but I see it in myself. I think others might cope by not fighting it, pretending to know, then moving on with their life. Then some scientist comes along, tells then they don't, and they get defensive.
If you want to be like them, focus on the process of science, not on being right about how nature "really" works. Those guys were driven by the desire to figure things out, to get some understanding of things but they knew when to stop worrying and move on to the next interesting thing where progress could be made. They were not so religious as to spend their life trying to achieve some sort of final absolute understanding.
It was a long forum discussion, and well over a dozen engineers, mathematicians, and physicists kept saying the same thing. Some wrong long (>500 word) posts. We were all ignored. This person was invested in the idea that they had an insight that centuries' worth of work had overlooked.
What's wrong with something like "set arr idx newvalue"?