That's a nice idea, but the problem is that, as the summary says, enabling ubiquitous touch would require some radical changes to our current UIs - anything interactive must become much bigger, toolbars are favored over menus, you lose a mouse button, etc. Most of these would make the mouse-based experience worse in order to enable the touch-based experience. *That's* why no one is doing this. You can't just add it in cheaply, and there's little evidence it's worth a large cost.

I've been working in games for 10 years, and I really, *really* wish I could agree with you.

Did you know that it's only been in the last few years that review scores and sales started to correlate? Until recently, there was virtually no connection between the review scores of your game and how well it sold, and it's still somewhat tenuous.
(see http://games.venturebeat.com/2009/05/29/does-game-quality-translate-into-better-financial-performance/ and http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/features/sales_vs_score.php for some backup on that.)

If I could show you a graph of marketing budget vs sales, you'd see that the correlation is much stronger. Making a great game doesn't immediately make people aware of it, and the public isn't the most sophisticated video game consumer.

Remember Daikatana? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana (I can't believe I'm posting a wp link in case people on Slashdot don't know what Daikatana is. No one click that.)) It was famous for being over-hyped and a total mess. It looked good once, but by launch anyone who knew about games knew that it would not be good. And it was still a top-10 seller for 3 months on the back of name recognition. Because the majority of game buyers don't know much about games (just like most industries). People had heard of the game, and they forgot that what they heard was a joke, so they bought it. Oh yeah, it had a big marketing budget too...

The reality is, sales (and therefore income) are better correlated to investment in advertising than the game itself. That pains me (as a game designer) deeply, but it's true. Things like this article used to peg my rage meter, but there's no point in getting upset at EA for realizing the way the market works.

Luckily, that's changing. The market is becoming more savvy, and quality is finally becoming important to publishers. I'm not spilling inside secrets when I say that WB is very excited about the high quality of Arkham Asylum. They knew it would be good, but you can never be sure that a game will be great, and their faces light up whenever they talk about it. It's very encouraging to me to see executives this excited about quality; that's new.

It's now common to hear people say things like "They're an 80+ developer" or "We're targetting 85+", which is also really encouraging. People used to talk about making good games, but now it's important that you be able to clearly establish that. It used to be only sales that mattered, but now people are more willing to accept that if you make quality games, the sales will come. That's huge, and you can expect to see it shift more resources from marketing to production, where they belong.

I wouldn't want to throw out a number like 50%, but if you took your average PC game, got it to compile, and threw it on a 360, I'd expect to performance anywhere from 20%-80% of what you'd get after optimizing it for the console. It's largely going to depend on how multithreaded your architecture was. I can't give you a source, but I've been doing exactly this for 7-8 years, so I trust me.

I don't have nearly the experience with Sony platforms (doing my first title on those now), but the idiot's-port performance would be much worse. That's not a knock on the PS3; it's just much further removed from a PC than a 360 is.

Anyone who's spent time seriously optimizing knows that there's a lot you can do if you know that it will only be built by this compiler, run on this architecture, with this much RAM, etc.

I'm an old-school PC shooter developer, so I definitely felt like you, that there's no way a controller can match mouse+keyboard. Until I watched this exact scenario play out every day for months. Then I changed my mind.

When TF2 came out, my office of game developers was quite excited. We had an official TF2 flag that would go up whenever the servers did; we played every lunchtime and after work, often for hours.

Two of the players were young guys who grew up on Halo, not Marathon/Pathways the way a good person should. Since we're making 360 games, we all have 360 controllers that plug into our PCs, so that's what they used.

I only know details about one of the guys, but he was very good. He was heavily recruited by professional Halo teams, that sort of thing. When the games began, he claimed that he'd show them all that a controller was just as good. They laughed. Then he (and the other guy too, I think) showed up at or near the top of the leaderboards every day. And they stopped.

The PC players are no slouches either, lest you get the wrong idea. There's at least one guy that was in a top quake clan for years (not thresh's, killcreek's), that sort of thing. We all thought there was no way, but the controller players held their own.

We still never stopped making fun of the controller players, of course, and eventually got them to try out mouse+keyboard. After the learning curve they did admit that it was better, which restores some of my faith in life, but controller players can definitely compete with mouse+keyboard players, if they're good enough.

Really? Palm had an App Store? I had a Palm V, VII, and a first-gen Treo, and I never saw a centralized place to buy a wide variety of apps. There were a few, scattered sites that each sold their own product, and a few boxes (mostly office-lite, Tetris, and Bejeweled) at the big box stores, but that was all I ever ran across.

Palm may have had thousands of apps, but without a centralized distribution mechanism, an individual user only ever saw a tiny fraction of those. Where they did find them, sure, a Palm can be just as sticky as an iPhone. To get anecdotal, my father clung to his palm forever because of a few key reference programs he used as a physician. Changing to any phone without those apps would cost him a significant amount of money, so he held off upgrading until he could get an iPhone, which has equivalents.

I think that having crucial apps worked out great for Palm, they just didn't work it enough. And spent a lot of time and money shooting themselves in the foot, face, and anything else handy, which didn't help.

I ended up going with the one simply called "Todo". It's been a while since the auditions, but I believe the winning features were the way it allowed me to quickly enter and order tasks, the ability to maintain multiple, independent task lists, and the support for nested task lists (though only one level deep).

I don't have any evidence, but if I had to guess I'd say that it's the app store that made the difference. The app store is truly transformative, in many non-obvious ways.

It brings network effects to the phone. For a while it seemed everyone I knew had a RAZR, but the popularity of the phone added no value to the individual user. With the iPhone, however, the popularity of the phone brings increased developer attention, which the app store translates to improved functionality, creating a positive feedback loop. Friends will also recommend apps to each other, further creating a network effect, and reminding the non-iphone-owning friends what they're missing.

The app store brings the best form of lock-in Windows ever had - But will it run my apps? - to the phone. Suddenly no non-iPhone can be a true upgrade, since you will likely lose some of your app functionality. Common things, like interfaces for major social sites, etc., will likely be standard, but everyone will have a different set of apps they consider crucial, which will make upgrading difficult. The breadth of the app store has brought the long tail to the phone. It also allows people to be very picky. I spent a several weeks testing out various todo lists on the iPhone, and I won't be happy to change phones unless it has a todo list that meets the very specific criteria I developed.

Certainly other phones will soon have access to app stores of their own, but the huge lead that Apple now has will make it very hard for someone else to catch up. They'll tout how they don't have the same approval headaches that the iPhone does, and that openness will be great. But we don't have to look far for lessons on how the popular operating system can be vastly inferior, yet still more successful than competitors.

The iPhone app store sets the iPhone up to succeed for all the reasons that Windows has. I think it's going to take a significant technology leap or other serious market disruption to stop them at this point. Regardless of how you feel about Apple, you have to respect the the way they've played this.

You say that if you own stock in a company, you own part of its buildings, factories, etc., but what does ownership give you in this case? Can you take your part of that building and go sell it to someone else? Can you take it and use it in your house? Can you have the workers you own get you coffee? What you "own" in this case is entirely virtual. There's a theoretical mapping onto some real items, but the "ownership" that you have over those is very different than the ownership you have over a piece of furniture in your home.

I've conducted dozens of programmer interviews, and I totally disagree. The point of the interview is not to get a job, it's to allow both parties a chance to see if this pairing will work. If I can tell that a prospective employee is just concerned with getting hired, that's a huge red flag. I want to hire someone passionate about the same things that my team is passionate about, someone who will have a good sense of humor when we're both still there at 2 AM, and, of course, someone who has the skills required.

The vast majority of candidates, when they get to the "Do you have any questions for us?" bit, just clam up. "Uh, no, not really." Oh? You're about to commit 40+ hours a week to working for me, and you can't think of anything you'd like to get reassurance on before that happens? I think of this part of the interview as a critical thinking test. You're about to be thrown into a new project; what are the important questions to ask?

Sticking to the job is fine; there are a lot of questions that are good to ask there, but I view going outside the job, to questions about fit, demographics, team structure and interaction, etc as a sign of experience. You've got a lot less to worry about from the guy who asks if his cynical style will be a problem than from the guy who doesn't. Questions about fit show me that you know what it takes to make you happy, which is great. We can check to see if our culture matches, if not, no hard feelings. I work in video games, so the attitude might be a bit different; every company says you should be excited about your work, but most people here actually are, and if you're not it's often a problem. The more people like that we can weed out, the better.

As an interviewer, I love the questions the interviewee asks. As parent poster implies, they tell you a lot about what the candidate thinks is important. Questions that focus solely on job function, ignoring job environment, show someone inexperienced or uninterested. If the questions show that the candidate is trying to find a good fit, a place where he can be himself and excel, that's the guy that gets the thumbs up.

Though Halo obviously wasn't concerned with balancing classes, they iterated on their single-player maps and combat design through multiplayer gameplay. At GDC a few years ago they said that their basic process was to rough out a campaign level, get a bunch of people to jump into a multiplayer game there, and see what developed. After they would group up and discuss where the natural choke points are, spots with great vistas or cover for sniping, and just generally where a fun battle develops. Tweak the level to emphasize those areas, throw some AI in, set them up to do that really cool thing Bob did that one time, and you've got a hit game.

I don't think techniques like this are really all that uncommon. I've worked on a number of FPS titles, and while we were never clever enough to test out the SP levels in MP, most other balance decisions were made there. There are a lot of reasons this makes sense. First off (and Bungie mentioned this as well), you often have your multiplayer up and running well before you have your AI written. (If you don't build the MP in from the beginning, it will usually be a nightmare to work with for the rest of the project.) Also, many of these decisions are made, or at least informed, by a consensus. When we were balancing weapons, we would usually get the whole team to play multiplayer for a few rounds, group up and get some quick impressions, modify and distribute new config files, then repeat. Those discussions are more useful when everyone is coming from the same context.

I've been writing PC/console games for 10 years now, and these days if your system locks (at least while playing something like TF2, especially fullscreen) there's a 90% chance it's a driver issue, most likely video drivers.
I've been a mac user since 1984, run ubuntu on my netbook, and have refused to install any MS software on my macs (mostly as a test). I also have to run windows at work (xbox dev sort of requires it), and it almost never crashes. It hurts me to say it, but it's true.
There are still countless horrible design flaws all over windows, but frequent OS instability in the absence of buggy driver-level code is now rare.

Sure, the house makes its money from the rake, but since that's a percentage of the pot, the house has a vested interest in ensuring big hands. That's also the kind of drama that makes poker most exciting. Put simply, it's never in the house's benefit for a player to have a bad hand.

I'm not saying that the online poker sites are stacking decks this way, but it's a mistake to say that they don't have any incentive.

> The reason why so many people still prefer vim or emacs is that we can do everything efficiently using the keyboard only
> You might think that something as simple as switching between files isn't trivial in vim/emacs, but that only shows that you haven't learned either.

When I used Visual Studio regularly (don't hate - you try using something else to make Xbox games) I did everything through the keyboard as well. Ctrl-I to enter immediate mode, of UnBlah.cpp, keybinds to switch between associated headers and cpps, etc. I had keybinds macro'ed to build or run every configuration, so I could do it with a single key chord without moving my hands from the keyboard or even switching apps.

At the same time I was writing our linux-based dedicated server (for the PC SKU) over ssh using vim and makefiles. I love vim; I use it for just about everything text-based I do (and once as a hex editor in a pinch). But I don't use it for writing serious code. Simple perl scripts sure. But a project with hundreds of source files, dozens of libs, about a dozen build flavors of each, etc? The IDE wins.

The bit about being able to work from anywhere in the world is nice. It's hard for an IDE to match that (unless you can spare $20 for a thumb drive. Zing!). But if that's not a big deal, the IDE wins out for complex projects.

Writing code is complex. Complex projects are complex. Tools to manage them are also complex. This goes for the CLI and GUI tools (though the GUI tools often put a friendly face on the simple things). Either flavor is going to take time and attention to master, and either can be very powerful. Think back to when you were first learning emacs or vim - how long did that process take? Assume it will take 25-50% as long to learn a GUI tool well. Give it that time, then make your call.

While I agree with you that questions phrased like this one are stupid, it's just a simple regexp to turn:

"my boss at work wants me to do X, but I'd really rather do Y; what are the merits of X versus Y?"

into

"I'm trying to build a case at work for changing our policy of X to Y; can Slashdot provide any good arguments?"

And while this does have an air of "Can Slashdot do my math homework?", it could pose an interesting question, and doesn't deserve the summary dismissal that the first question does.