On one hand, it's probably cheaper shipping to get those brides from Russia and China that it would be for those guys living in New York. On the other hand, they often don't put enough food and water in the crate for that two week voyage on the ship, to say nothing of the air (water) holes.

A friend and I have been going back and playing some older games just because, and it's still remarkable just how few people it took to create some of those iconic games. Or some of those lesser-known gems. Some examples:

• Legend of Zelda (NES) - roughly 12 developers
• Metroid (NES) - roughly 12 as well
• Actraiser (SNES) - roughly 50-ish
• Guardian Legend (NES) - haven't beaten it yet
• Castlevania II (NES) - Unknown, credits are a joke... watch the AVGN episode if you don't beleive me
• Earthworm Jim (SNES) - been a while since i beat it, probably 50-100 people... though I think marketing and sales are in there too.

There are certainly others, but it still illustrates the point that great games don't need stupid amounts of marketing, or absurdly large development teams.

I'm not so sure ATI does blow equally. I have two 660ti's in SLI to power 3 monitors. Anything beyond the ~2 year old 327 series drivers does not work for me. Without surround mode, I at least get three screens with newer drivers... generally I get a stupid amount of slowdown to the point where I feel like I'm running Windows 7 on a 486. If I somehow manage to turn on surround mode, all three screens are recognized, but only 2 of them display anything. The slowdown also gets much, much worse. To date I have not found anything about other people experiencing similar issues, and all of the nVidia documentation shows "this driver improves surround on 600 series and higher chipsets!". 3 fps is better than 2 fps, but still useless.

It might actually be reasonable. There are a number of businesses out there that provide blackberries or other "work" cell phones. They could also be throwing in assorted iPads and other tablets, since they too probably have some 3g/4g plan associated with them. While I too doubt that it's 1 for 1, there are some areas where it might be 2 or 3 devices for one person. Who knows whether or not those folks make up for those ends of the world without cell towers.

You're kidding right?

Do a job search on LinkedIn or Monster for "Computer Scientist" and see how many of those listings are web development. I did a search in my home town (not really CS friendly) and of the 2 dozen jobs that turned up, 75% had ASP.NET or ColdFusion in the requirements.

The real question is how do we fix what HR has broken?

I'd really like to see a reference for this. Not because I disagree with your analogy, after all it's the basis for education and classical conditioning. It's a fair assumption that certain tasks such as facial recognition and memory recollection can be associated with certain regions of the brain. However, we still don't know how we go from synapses firing to midget wrestling. Looking at it from another direction, we don't regrow brain cells, they don't change in size or form like a popular anthill path may become stronger via compaction of soil or wider to accomodate more ants. We don't know specifically if a neuron has a "firing limit", or otherwise may wear out over time. At least, in my limited research I've never come across such studies.

Agreed. Even the decay of RAM or any sort of storage medium susceptible to decay can be calculated somehow. How else would we have MTBF and expected write limits for Hard Disks, SSD's and such?

Dead you say?

Nintendo has a rebuttal with their 3DS sales. Sony disagrees as well. Each of their handhelds has reportedly sold 4 million+ units in their 2.5 years or so of being on the market. While that's no rush to 6 million of the PS4 and XB1, it's still a significant amount of hardware to sell.

Unless you mean that the hardware itself doesn't work anymore, in which case I'd have to ask what you're doing with it. My Gameboy color and Game Gear work just fine.

To say nothing of the training between MS Office versions. Office 2k3 and Libre/OpenOffice are very close analogues of one another. When MS Office 2k7 came along with it's "ribbon" interface, my work had a hayday with getting all the users used to 2k3 up to speed with how to do their job in 2k7. Hell, it even took some of the more savvy folks months to remember where things had moved to and involved a lot of clicking around the ribbon and scanning for whatever it was they were looking for. It's arguable that instead of 2k7 they could have moved to LibreOffice and done away with the training, and saved ~$100 per seat. When you have some thousand users, that savings would add up.

Need I say more?

This and this. It's also a neverending cycle.

In my mind it starts with hiring managers using correct terminology. Do a search for "software engineer" or "computer scientist" on LinkedIn or any other job site, and see how many web developer and database admin jobs show up. This isn't to belittle all web development, since some can get pretty creative in their optimizations (the "science" part of CS), but many simply have HTML and Javascript as requirements.

Once managers begin to understand the skill set they actually need and start asking the right questions, things will start looking better.

I'm surprised no one mentioned this so far. DOCUMENT EVERYTHING. Any IT person worth his salt should have thoroughly documented the configuration, standard software loadout, group policies, audit policies, etc... such that if one does get hit by a bus, the organization won't be crippled. Having handed over the keys on more than one occasion, I can honestly say that ip_freely_2000 is right, maintain a couple of your own hooks in case the new guy doesn't work out, but take a step back and enable him to do his job. Note the word choice, your job as manager is to enable him, not just turn your back and let him sink or swim.

For our more visual learners:

Check this cartoon

These answers are short-sighted and don't get to the real questions a game designer should be asking. Lets look a little bit closer:

1. Are there doors in your game? This is really asking about portals from one area to another. Do a web search for an analysis of the Doom 3 source code and you'll see what I mean. Is your game broken into logical sections and how do you navigate between them?
2. Can the player open them? This is really asking if there are restrictions in place to prohibit free movement in the game world. Doom had key cards and colored doors. Mario has Pipes, paintings and stars, etc... Zelda is famous for "soft locks", where you can see something, but you need a new ability to get there, like the hookshot or bow and arrow.
3. Can the player open every door in the game? This is more of a visual style question. Again with Doom and the doors, some did not open, such as the one you came through to get to the beginning of the level (the ugly flat silver doors). Uncharted, Tomb Raider, Resistance, and even Halo are intended to take place in a beleivable world. All of them have a point A, a point B, and a path between them (sometimes 2 or a really wide path). Would you honestly want to go into every single building, every single floor, every single room in Saints Row? Infamous? Crackdown? GTA? Assassins Creed? Do you have any idea how long the development time would be? How much storage space you'd need to store an entire city the size of Brooklyn?
4. What tells a player a door is locked and will open, as opposed to a door that they will never open? This is a question about visual queueing. AVGN had an episode on Aliens that touched on this, the doors weren't distinguishable from ones that opened and ones that did not. Castlevania Simon's Quest was actually pretty good about it, open doors could be entered, closed doors could not. Gears of War had little green lights over doors that could open, particularly those that the player was supposed to go through.
5. What happens if there are two players? In Doom, if the door was open any player could pass. If they didn't have the key, the door didn't open. Simple. Resident Evil 5 allowed players to go through almost any door, only a few required teamwork.
6. Does it only lock after both players pass through the door? In Doom, no. In RE5, yes. In Gears of War, sometimes.
7. 7. What if the level is REALLY BIG and can't all exist at the same time? This is really a question of separation of media within the game. How do you handle having too much for your 2GB of RAM? Do you simply crash and tell the user they need to buy more RAM? Do you detect that limit and begin streaming? Given that almost every PC is separate, distinct, and unique from almost every other PC, you can't possibly know exactly how much video RAM or system RAM a user may have. Best you can do is "minimum suggested", which in many cases is only going to store a fraction of a level. Castlevania SOTN did this very well, those odd rooms with no music were loading rooms. No loading progress bar, no "Please Wait". It would load a good portion (if not all) of the area (e.g. Marble Gallery) into memory and let the player muck around. In other games the loading may just be of the needed textures, while only loading the level geometry for the immediate large room. To say "Your technology is not good enough" is taking an elitist approach to design. An XBOX360 is not capable of loading the entirety of Gears of War 3 into RAM all at once. Most computers aren't capable of loading the entirety of Skyrim into RAM all at once. WoW is over 20GB, compressed. Uncompressed who knows, but Windows is not going to allocate that much RAM to a single process, not when you also have web browsers, music, youtube, netflix, whatever loaded too. The doors provide a logical separation of data, I believe that in many cases they are used to queue the game engine to drop one set of textures/geometry and load in another.

Your complaints are valid, but your biggest beef is the visual queueing, and many games don't get that right. I don't think "it's a door, it should open" is the right approach. Assassin's Creed would look stupid if you had an antire city with a couple dozen doors. Saints Row and GTA would look similarly stupid if the only buildings with doors were ones you could enter. That's maybe 3 dozen in Saints Row 3, and the city has over a hundred buildings. A better approach would be "how do we tell the user they can enter this door?". I'd say Doom did it pretty well. Mario and his assorted pipes, not so much.

All good questions, but many are still premature. Remember this is due to be released in October, which means going gold sometime ~6 weeks prior (or something like that). They'd have to have things wrapped up in August, and we're in April. Plenty of time for a death march. This is all my speculation.

I doubt they could do much about world size now, being so late in development. Immersion depends entirely on the players suspension of disbeleif. Some people find the old-school Thief games incredibly immersive, I just found them to be a pain in the ass. All it takes is one awkward NPC statement to break some people out of it. Gamers are incredibly fickle that way.

Well said, eye candy can't make up for crap gameplay. Just look at DNF (sort of), or any of the free to play chinese MMOs. I would bet the dialogue has already been recorded, any "matching" is probably being worked on now.

I doubt we'll see something like "That was awesome how you did that triple backflip off that boulder and stabbed two guys in the back." The number of things a player can do is just too large to enumerate every response. I bet the most we'll see is "good job".

It's still in what I'd guess is a beta. That's a question come October.

Another question for October.

I doubt any game could effectively do this. The number of possible styles is just too large, there's any number of variations of Rambo-ing, sniping, fist fighting, etc...
If it's worth it's salt, you'll have to come up with the appropriate counter to whatever you're facing.

Which part of A.I.? That encompasses movement, facial expressions of NPCs, weapon choices of enemies, motion of enemies, tactics of enemies, weapon behaviors (i.e. jamming or inaccuracy), tactics of allies...

I'm assuming you mean the tactics of enemies. Looking at gamasutra's articles (thinking the Uncharted A.I. scripting engine), they still have plenty of time to refine it. Other things, such as hiding behind vs inside a rock, may be harder to find and fix.