nihilocrat

> I've worked in environments like that. Unfortunately, the open space looks like "not working" to people and is highly visible. Since no one wants to be publicly seen as not working, they just ended up being a very nicely decorated and inviting ghost town.

FYI, this is exactly what happens to luxurious and inviting game rooms at videogame companies.

Drone attack.

Just to clarify, I'm not wearing a tinfoil hat, I just have seen the circumstances of some drone attacks: against US citizens in places where no war was declared and with collateral damage shrugged off. From the US perspective, it is an easy means of getting rid of people they don't like with neither the need for judicial proceedings nor formal declaration of war. The only thing that is really stopping them right now is that Assange is currently in a highly populated part of the UK, and not in the middle of nowhere in Yemen.

If they did that here, we'd need to find a new CEO... but the programmers would be in good shape.

Am I the only one who can't read this graph? It looks like it's rotated 90 degrees and there's no time axis so I don't see what this is representing. I don't understand what the legend for the Y axis means.

I also think government dilutes the effectiveness of the experts it employs, but at the same time the private sector is amazingly, exceedingly incapable of seeing benefit from anything but immediate profits. Investing in highly risky pilot programs which have high costs and uncertain benefits is something the private sector, except perhaps a few optimistic billionaires, would never do. If we had never supported difficult-to-quantify never-never projects, we wouldn't be finding exoplanets, we would have never discovered that asteroids are clumps of unfathomably abundant resources, we would have never gotten to the Moon, and Europeans would never have explored the New World, because the benefits at the time seemed dubious and the funding came from governments.

I am optimistic just because I have a high amount of trust for German government. They are a lot more cautious and less bandwagon-hopping and more capable of pulling stuff like this off whereas for most other industrialized governments the Energiewende would just be a dramatic stage show created by former-execs-turned-bureaucrats to put taxpayer dollars into contractor's pockets without any concern for actual results.

This is not really possible if you are working on a mass-market product, like a videogame. Financial success is synonymous with publicity, so if you STFU you will almost certainly not succeed.

Sure, you don't need to brag about it or post sales figures directly on your site (Minecraft), but people are going to notice and often try to clone your game.

"If you destroy publicly funded research, you leave us in a situation where only the big corporations can afford the drastic security precautions needed to continue biotechnology research - and you therefore further promote a situation you say you are trying to avoid."

Considering the scary amount of money and power Monsanto has, and the terrifying things they do with their GM patents, this is probably be best argument if you are convinced GM plants are evil.

Well, that and the fact that it's /research/ and not the industrial growing of GM foods.

Why recharge when you can just replace the batteries in such a situation? It would make for a better show, anyways.

Crytek deserves all the praise they get for their hard work in rendering...

...but...

Why are we conditioned to think that "the future of gaming" is solely a function of a game's audiovisual quality? I would like to see a "future of gaming" video that shows off highly-interactive (rather than just very pretty) gameworlds and characters. NPCs that notice you are trying to put a bucket on their heads, for example.

I don't feel the analogy is entirely accurate. Imagine having to learn 5 "if" statements, or 10 ways to say "++". In a spoken conversation, you don't get to look up the API docs if you forgot something. However, most programmers are likely at least bilingual because most programming books are in English and many companies in non-English countries use English as a common language.

However, I do feel there's some similarities between constructing a possibly-correct sentence and seeing if it actually works, and constructing some possibly-correct code and seeing if it compiles.

I use "exploiting" in a more technical sense here. An exploit is using a bug in the game for personal gain, in an always-on multiplayer game with an economy affecting all players, the permanent effects of an exploit can be much worse. That's not what's happening here, because no bugs are necessarily being exploited (though maybe at one point they were; a buggy drop rate resulting in excessively high yields for farmers, for example) but the farmers tend to get lumped in with the exploiters in the developer's mind because the exploit/fraud departments of customer service work pretty closely together.

Gold farming has generally been considered a fraud of sorts, because it can seriously damage the in-game economy or the player perception of the economy, and many gold farmers perform actual fraud (creating accounts with fake or stolen CC numbers).

Actually, there's a major shift in the industry (to "free to play") that companies have been making. Basically, the company provides an in-game item shop where players can use real money to buy in-game items. These shops accomplish pretty much what this guy was doing, but keep the money in the company purse, and circumvent many of his limitations: there's no need to farm the game when you make the game, and you can sell items which farmers could never obtain.

In almost all cases, it has meant a higher amount of revenue, either for brand-new games or for games which transition to the F2P model or an in-between hybrid model. It looks like, generally, big-name MMORPGs are still starting out with a subscription model, but most games at other tiers are launching free-to-play with an item shop. Lots of long-running MMOs are transitioning to a hybrid model to add revenue to a product from which little is expected but also little is being spent on (just enough money to keep the servers running and keep a slow flow of updates).

I think it would be much harder these days for a player to make money by through farming, except for with the old guard of MMORPGs which still don't have an item shop. I could be wrong, I am not looking at these economies closely so I don't know if the farmers are actually able to provide items / prices competitive with the developrs.

I work at a company that makes MMOs. If this guy's statements are true, then he was making significantly more money exploiting an MMO than I do by programming one.

The irony is staggering.