How The Game Is Played

More evidence the game industry needs us...

Seems this is a day of outages in the massively multiplayer space.

I just tried to log onto MatrixOnline and found ALL their servers down except one that was closed and for admins only. (Ironically enough that one is named "Regression". I'd guess its a test server.)

Havent found an explaination yet but I DID find two OTHER massively multiplayer games that are down:

Eve Online:

http://www.stratics.com/content/news/arc8-2004.php

And Dransik:

http://www.stratics.com/content/news/arc4-2003.shtml

Interestingly enough, the EVE folks are blaming their outage partly on non-redudnant design foisted on them by deployment and management software from IBM....

This industry is literally dying for a standard solution to game server reliability, scalability and data persistance.

And thats what my baby-- the Sun Game Server -- is all about.

EDIT: additional, cheap-shot department: "IBM-The On Demand Operating Environment." Apparently that's not on user-demand. MatrixOnline servers have been up and down tonight like yoyos and the users are hopping mad.

There's a blog in here somewhere about the dangers of letting marketing over-promise for our technology... or doing it ourselves, but I want to think a bit before I write it.

Posted at 11:08PM Apr 04, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[0]

The Confusion of Self-Interest

Okay, if you will all forgive me, I'm going to wax philosophical again. This isn't quite a rant, more of a musing. Knowing me though I'm sure there will be a rant hidden in it somewhere. In fact im sure it will end on one :)

Jonathan's last blog (not the April 1st one, but the one before that) got me thinking about something I haven't thought about in a bit. (http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan )

A young friend of mine about 10 years ago was a devotee of Ayn Rand. He breathlessly explained to me the theory of "informed self-interest." The short story for anyone not familiar with Rand's work (and way too over-simplified for anyone who is and for that I apologize) is that it is a free-market concept of morality. The idea that moral behavior is ultimately defined by what is best for a society so, if everyone acts in their own best interest, they will act properly and responsibly in regards to society.

With a sigh, and my whole 8 years or so of age over my 22 year old friend, I said "Yes, thats great IF people actually knew even the majority of their time where their self interest truly lies."

People in general are myopic. Americans are so socially nearsighted that they probably qualify as legally blind. Not long ago I had someone look at me in all seriousness and say, "You don't have kids. Why on earth do you want to pay for public schools?"

Now there are all kinds of good reasons for having top quality schools. Reasons in my self-interest having to do with the health of the American economy, our ability to globally compete, and the ability of the masses to do any kind of justice to this thing we call democracy. For this person though I realized a more down to earth explanation was going to be necessary and I simply said, "If your kid has a good job, he won't steal my stereo."

Besides blatant myopia, Americans also put way too much weight on comfort and high on that comfort list is emotional comfort. I am frankly terrified to see the number of dollars spent (or in my opinion wasted) on emotional comfort in America. This in my opion was fundamentally what Jonathan ran into with the customer that had their own version of Linux. Emotional comfort.

They had worked hard on that Linux, they were proud I'm sure of their technical accomplishment. They wanted to remain proud of it. If they accepted that, at this point, it was hindering not helping them and should be written off, they would have to stop being proud of it. I don't think they had the emotional strength to do that.

Frankly, I think few Americans do. There was a cartoon in last Sunday's paper that showed a man talking to the camera. He says to the camera

I'm part of that generation that was told anything I did was wonderful That got awards for just showing up to school. That got told any paper I wrote was magnificiant. I have a real problem dealing with criticism and can't hold a job. But thats okay, the last time I got fired I called up my old teacher and she gave me an award for it."

Life is full of hard things. Hard choices. It is hard enough to know what is really in your self-interest in this complex and complicated world without having your emotions lead you astray. But thats exactly what we do in America. Our most important decisions are made based on 30 second emotional appeals.

The most successful political campaigns are the ones that can find the right words, not to appeal to reason, but to appeal to emotion. Anyone who is aware of the politics of the last 30 years knows that social security has been a target for dismantling by the republican party for at least that long. But "dismantling" is such a nasty, negative word. George Bush instead says he is going to "save" social security. Doesn't that sound better? So what if he's curing the tooth-ache by killing the patient. We just won't talk about that because it doesn't have the right emotional appeal.

In the heat of anger of ENRON this country passed legislation that does NOTHING to those genuine white collar criminals but instead put a huge burden on legitimate companies and took away a major form of compensation for working engineers. It as an emotional, reactive decision that I am afraid will haunt us and our economy for a long time to come.

I earlier ranted on the way the English language has been misused and abused in just such political manuvers in order to strengthen a cause's emotional appeal, so I won't add to that here except to say its part of the same family of phenomena.

Why is this so effective? I suspect its part our training and society that has taken to valuing "emotional security" over all else. We learn this in school when "self-esteem" is more important then getting the right answer.

I also suspect its part simple intellectual laziness. Crtical thinking is hard work. Responding with your gut is easy and automatic. And I suspect its part the failure of those very schools I mentioned earlier to teach and value the skills required for critical thought. Critical thought means being critical, and thats become a no-no in 21st c. education.

SO where am I going with all this? I'm not sure. Except that both Karl Marx and Ayn Rand in my opinion make the same mistake. At the end they are both economists and economists think logically.

Which has almost nothing to do with the thought processes of 21st c. Americans. To be fair, the lack of rational thought may be inherent in the species. We certainly see enough of it in other places. If everyone truly acted in their global self-interest, there would be no war. War is never in our self-interest, not on the large scale. War however IS very common, very emtional, and I am afraid very human.

And with that in mind I am going to end with another story. ABout a year ago at a roleplay game convention I was up late talking politics with a very good friend of mine who is close to my own age. (yes believe it or not a lot of us grown gamers DO have lives and can carry on adult conversations.) He is a very intelligent, very well spoken libertarian. I said to him, "You know, I've heard the statement that an armed society is a polite society. That assumes that people are smart enough to consider the consequences of their actions. I don't think most people are." He smiled at me and said, "You misunderstand. An armed society is a polite society... after about a month."

I had to laugh and admit that made a sort of rough Darwinian sense... assuming what would be left would be enough people to call any kind of society whatsoever.

In America, at least, Im not so sure it would be.

Posted at 04:04AM Apr 04, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[2]