I've worked with scrum, and it sucks. It only works if people work together, are largely self-organising, and don't deliberately chuck roadblocks into other teams paths to get them off their own joblist.

I believe the latter of those in particular gives away pretty bad organizational problems, scrum or no. They would probably manifest themselves just in a different way if you tried to do things different on the surface.

And a team that works together, is largely self-organizing, and doesn't deliberately screw other teams is worth its weight in gold without scrum, too.

You actually have to do it more or less properly for it to work.

No, you really don't. You need the other ingredients: a self-organizing team that works together and with the other groups in a company. You add scrum to that, you've got a great team. You add a few bits of scrum to that, you've got a great team. You add some standard corporate culture to that, you've got a great team. Are you seeing the pattern here?

I'm a big fan of a team following good processes (testing your work, gathering feedback, being realistic in schedules), I'm a big fan of a team being invested in their work, and I'm a big fan of open communication. Scrum argues for some of the same things, and it's good that these scrum proponents are arguing for all of these things. But you don't need a scrum master to get the good stuff, and I don't think scrum will turn a bad team into a good team - it will just turn a team that isn't doing scrum into a team that isn't doing scrum right.

No, it's not. "I know you tried to do scrum, but you had a failed project, so you did it wrong."

In my experience, scrum is just snake oil. I don't think it's very good to begin with, but worse is that a) everyone modifies scrum to some extent to fit their organization and b) if a project using slightly modified scrum fails, it was because they modified scrum.

Of course, the solution always seems to be hire more good scrum masters, who are "rarer then you would think!" That's really the part that is snake oil, in my mind. It's a business model for consultants, and the trainers of those consultants. This is even more clear with the scrum model's insistence that a scrum master has a "pig" role.

Maybe all the scrum organizations should promote the idea that every time a scrum project fails (yes, even with modifications, which is how it always works), the scrum master gets fired. Here, "fails" should probably mean over budget or over schedule, by a dollar or a day. That might give the scrum master a role where they feel like their bacon is on the line. But of course that won't happen; scrum masters aren't team leads (as you point out), they're not managers, they're just coaches... one more person not doing the actual work who has to be involved, but with less accountability and more power than anyone else in the project.

Depending on what you're browsing. SomethingAwful? NYTimes.com? Stack Overflow? It can't hurt to encrypt the traffic and make it harder to sniff. Banking, buying stuff from Amazon? Sure, PKI is important there to maintain a chain of trust that makes it harder for your identity and money to be stolen.

Right now, we have the second half, and that's it.

Why is there any unencrypted HTTP traffic going around? Encrypt everything, absolutely everything, traveling over the wire. Then, when it's important, you should also worry about whether the machine on the other end is who they say they are.

There's not going to be a simple answer to your questions. If you want to make games, make games. You can write them in Flash or Objective-C or Perl or PHP or Lisp or C++ or... Obviously you'll have a little trouble writing an iPhone game in Flash, or a Flash game in !Flash, so choose the right tool for the job; but if you're in college, your goal shouldn't be to learn a single tool and then pretend that all the jobs you might get later in life use that one tool.

Also, most of the game industry doesn't care about your degree(s). They care about what you can do, and in particular how you've demonstrated that you can do things by having done things. So do things, and get them done. Get the degree to help you have a career to start on, a career to fall back on, and a career to move on to... burn out is common, and doing this your whole life and then retiring is ridiculously rare.

This from the guy who says in his signature: "Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts."

You haven't invested the time in this issue to understand it, never mind make pronouncements on it.

Errr, nope, I work on modern commercial games and Emacs works great. We exceed 10kloc by orders of magnitude, we have the budget for great tools, and Emacs is what I choose.

Warren Spector has been outspoken against MMOs as a particularly terrible example of "multiplayer" for a while too. I can understand that he doesn't want to work on them, but that doesn't make them any less fun, and I think he's failing to recognize the challenges of enabling meaningful emergent play.

...but sometimes I walk.

Small fees for one-time things are showing up in a lot of online games these days, no question. Guild Wars, City of Heroes, World of Warcraft, all support one-time fees for things like extra character slots, server transfers, and cosmetic (or complete) respecs. These are things that don't affect gameplay, are uncommon purchases for any individual player, but do improve player enjoyment (they also enhance revenue something fierce). Should they be free? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It makes sense for Warhammer Online to offer free server transfers right now to help balance populations, but in general players are closely tied to the community on their individual servers - so it makes a certain amount of sense to regard it as a value-added feature. Likewise, City of Heroes hands out free respecs like candy, but if you still can't get enough of them... sure, it makes sense to charge.

And then there are games that are free to play... they have to have some revenue model. Games like Puzzle Pirates demonstrate that a game can be fun, balanced, and robust, while still selling all manner of things that affect game play. The key with that approach, I think, is to use a dual currency model (as Puzzle Pirates does, as Iron Realms pioneered back in the '90s) that allows players - who never pay a cent - to trade with other players for all the benefits of spending money.

Of course there's also the Korean free to play model, or the model common for Facebook games where it is "free to play" but you have to pay in order to really enjoy the game (or worse, there is a subscription but you still have to engage in microtransactions in order to really enjoy the game) - I think this is the model players don't like, and fear every developer is planning on when they say free-to-play or microtransactions. I think developers and publishers know players hate this model, and are aware of the backlash they'll see if they use it; that doesn't mean they won't ever try it, but it does mean they'll tend to tread carefully and consider other models first.

On the other hand, that doesn't mean subscriptions are going away, because clearly a lot of players like to just pay a subscription, know how much they need to budget on a game, and know they don't risk a fevered drunken night of transactions running up their credit card bill. It's unlikely to go away, but it is going to have to start sharing the limelight with other models that address the needs of different segments of the population.