As someone with both AAA and game jam experience, you just put my vague misgiving about the AAA process right into words. This is exactly it.
At least my game jam teams have always focused on what the core game loop is first, built that, then iterated, and my AAA teams have always tried more of an assembly-line approach where there's no game at all until everyone's already feeling the pressure. Because supposedly it's more efficient to pre-plan everything and just trust that it all comes together perfectly (art, level design, system design, engineering, sound, etc) first try rather than leaving time to iterate.
Which kind of makes sense when much of generic management takes its cues from automotive manufacturing (assembly lines, Kanban, etc).
Interesting in the context of BGIII and its extended early access. I had to stop playing after a play through or two of EA because i wanted the game to still feel fresh when the entire game came out.
That depends on what the design of the network is.
In my mind Freenet is too free for reasons discussed in sibling comments (but in short, literally no safeguards against Not Safe For Life content, by design).
For me, practically, federation provides a far improved middle ground. People can still freely distribute content without being beholden to any particular middle man, but there is more visibility afforded to node operators about what they're hosting and they therefore can both remove content that they don't want to be hosting and remove users from their network who are making problems.
Gossip protocols are another solution which also works for similar reasons.
Ultimately, anonymity is an anti-pattern in the same way that the hot new zero-trust stuff is in the blockchain world. Humans, social beings that they are, fundamentally operate on trust, which fundamentally requires identification. Removing either of those creates more problems than it solves.
> Ultimately, anonymity is an anti-pattern in the same way that the hot new zero-trust stuff is in the blockchain world. Humans, social beings that they are, fundamentally operate on trust, which fundamentally requires identification. Removing either of those creates more problems than it solves.
Quite the opposite. Forced identification is an instrument of fascism. There is a reason the phrase "papers, please" is associated with the villains.
Communities can then be layered on top. But even there, what you need is a persistent identifier with which to build a reputation, not a government tracking number with which to be extracted from your bed at 4AM and shipped off to a prison cell if you're accused of crimethink.
The talk of "community standards" gets to the root of it. To have community standards you have to have a community, and each community will have its own standards. Which means the standards belong in the community and not in a generic protocol at the core of the network used by diverse communities with mutually incompatible ideals.
> But even there, what you need is a persistent identifier with which to build a reputation, not a government tracking number
The persistent identifier is all I mean. I agree that tying it to a government-issued identification is problematic since it then gives the government the administration/moderation power. As long as there is a persistent identifier (and one the community owns so it can take meaningful moderation/administration action when necessary), then we're good.
By "anonymity" I mean the absence of a persistent identifier (for example, someone uploading something to BitTorrent is anonymous by default, as far as I know).
> To have community standards you have to have a community, and each community will have its own standards. Which means the standards belong in the community
Also agree with this. This is where federation really shines in my book, as it lets each community apply its own standards while also enabling networking across communities with sufficiently compatible ideals while retaining the autonomy of each community.
Most communication tools in the original Freenet nowadays have persistent identifiers, because the experience within Freenet showed that not having any moderation causes constructive communication to break down.
The experience there proves that the methods used there for decentralized moderation succeeded at keeping communication friendly without centralized power or forced identification.
> As long as there is a persistent identifier (and one the community owns so it can take meaningful moderation/administration action when necessary), then we're good.
> By "anonymity" I mean the absence of a persistent identifier (for example, someone uploading something to BitTorrent is anonymous by default, as far as I know).
But these are separate layers. It's the same way that HTTP or TCP is "anonymous" in the sense that it doesn't assign any names to users (and anybody can connect to the coffee house Wi-Fi or use a VPN etc.), but Reddit (which uses HTTP and TCP) has usernames.
A P2P content-addressable storage system can be "anonymous" and it's not a problem, because all it's doing is hosting raw data. Then you build a P2P Reddit on top of it that has human moderation etc., but that's a separate thing made by separate people, and there could be arbitrarily many of them because they're not fused together.
It's like Netflix and Hulu could both use BitTorrent in the same way that PeerTube does, even though they're independent competitors. The main reason they don't is that Hollywood wants to hold out the pretense that using BitTorrent is some kind of dishonorable activity, not that there is anything actually unsuitable about it.
> This is where federation really shines in my book, as it lets each community apply its own standards while also enabling networking across communities with sufficiently compatible ideals while retaining the autonomy of each community.
A lot of the existing protocols are poorly designed around this though. Like one of the big problems on Mastodon is that users have a "home instance" and can't migrate from it, but then a lot of big instances don't federate with other instances by default, and if your instance dies then your account goes with it. This also makes it impossible for a user to use one account for everything, because there isn't necessarily any instance that federates with all of the communities the user wants to participate in. But since users will want that, and large instances will want dominance and can achieve it by not federating with small instances, it's a centralizing force that encourages the Gmail-ification of the system.
What you want is many diverse communities that anybody can fluidly move between and participate in simultaneously, not recreating the status quo and calling it a distributed system.
> Ultimately, anonymity is an anti-pattern in the same way that the hot new zero-trust stuff is in the blockchain world. Humans, social beings that they are, fundamentally operate on trust, which fundamentally requires identification. Removing either of those creates more problems than it solves.
You will forgive me, "indigochill", if I fail to respect your argument against anonymity made from behind a fake name.
> You are not going to solve a hard math problem with average IQ no matter how much persistence you throw at it.
I'm inclined to disagree, but there's an important piece here that I've found when solving problems that were at least hard for me: sometimes I can get hung up on making a particular approach work when it's not going to and what I need to do is back up and find a different angle of attack.
For example if you're solving a hard math problem with little math knowledge and average IQ, if you're really passionate and persistent about it, then you'd realize you first need to learn more math to build your understanding of the domain. IQ/persistence in this case is not really about the problem itself, but more about the problem-solving process itself.
Iceland is one example. They have a coast guard but no standing military. On the other hand, their independence is formally guaranteed by the US (and maybe others, I don't remember), so nobody's gonna be trying to annex them any time soon. On the other hand, Iceland's only been "independent" since slipping out from Denmark ~WW2.
But Iceland has decidedly not been stable. They gained de facto independence in 1918 and completely lost their sovereignty only 22 years later when Britain occupied them (that is despite them still having armed forces in 1940). Since WW2 things have obviously been stable-ish (things were really bad in 2009). How long do you think that would last once Iceland tried to exercise their sovereignty, for instance by leaving NATO?
Analogously, how long did the Shire last against a motivated attacker with comparatively little resources?
except Icelandic bankers toppled their own government in the 2008 credit crisis due to making a specific haven for certain kinds of crazy leveraged lending in the UK (!) (corrections welcome)
I'll take a stab at it, since I'm one of those privacy advocates (and also prone to making sweeping statements like this).
Let's say Alice and Bob are doing life and emailing each other about normal life stuff. Charlie runs their email server.
Charlie also runs an advertising business to fund his email server. He somehow reads (not necessarily manually, but the details don't matter) the emails coming through his server to learn what people are more likely to be interested in buying. Everyone benefits, right? Alice and Bob get free email, the advertisers get well-targeted ads, and Charlie gets paid by the advertisers.
Well, along comes the Police. They know that Charlie is able to access contents of emails going through his server, because it's how he funds his email server. The police would need a warrant to search Alice and Bob's communication for something that might incriminate them in an investigation, but Charlie doesn't need a warrant. The police strike a deal with Charlie of mutual benefit. Information for another revenue stream. But still, the police are upholders of justice and only use this "email tap" for good.
Time goes on and our glorious democracy erodes into an autocratic state (ask Germany - it happens!). Suddenly our justice-loving Police have become the Gestapo, but money talks and it's in Charlie's interest to stay on the Gestapo's good side, so the email tap remains in place and we have Alice and Bob, good people that they are, collaborating on how to resist the autocratic state, which gets funneled straight to the Gestapo. Bad guys win.
Essentially it boils down to this: the means for the public to resist tyranny is a necessary prerequisite for freedom. Conversely, the more power (and information is power, especially personal information) is centralized, the more impactful a potential hostile takeover becomes, and the easier to orchestrate (much easier to infiltrate/control one source of information than thousands).
Although a different context, I always find the writeups of cybersecurity CTFs that go through the "What I was thinking, what surprises I encountered, how I pivoted" process both more enjoyable and more enlightening than writeups that simply explain the solution as if it was known from the beginning.
At the same time there might be some editing since there might have been approaches tried that didn't go anywhere, and whether that's interesting/relevant to the reader is probably a judgement call from someone who knows the domain and whether those dead ends might have been natural things to try in that specific context.
I've never heard of a musical group or artist who can make a sustainable living on just a local scene (although maybe that's rather the point, since they stayed local to wherever they are). Even for huge artists, from what I've heard merch is where the money is, not ticket or record sales (or today, streaming, which is _ludicrously_ tilted against the artist actually making any money). Admittedly I last looked into this around twenty years ago and my sample is tilted more towards the folk singer-songwriter type rather than, say, DJs.
That's not to diss local artists, though. Some are incredibly talented, and I loved the scene I was in it. Just, if we're talking about investing, making music looked like 9 times out of 10 a money sink you do for the love of it, not an investment opportunity.
> Even for huge artists, from what I've heard merch is where the money is, not ticket or record sales
That’s not quite true. It’s an extreme example, but Taylor Swift’s personal earnings from her current tour is expected to end up in the billions.
Back in the day, touring was something of a marketing tool to sell records, today the records are marketing for the tours (and they build hype, which yields sponsorships and so on). Merch is an important revenue stream, but a large chunk of that is sold on tour.
That's like saying you should take VC money because you can end up being like Mark Zuckerberg. It's a 1/50'000'000 sort of case or perhaps even less likely.
I wasn’t suggesting anyone do anything, I was mostly trying to point out that large acts can make a lot of money on touring. Most make very little, if any at all.
Agreed but using examples like Taylor Swift in music is far off from focusing purely on (exited) unicorns when talking about VC. You have to look outside the 99th percentile to find generalized insights.
Plenty of musical groups make a living locally and not only pop music. If you play a classic instrument you get opportunities for festivals, parades, weddings, local shows. Joining a marching band can pay for your schooling for example.
Many classic rock bands with members in their 40/50/60s perform live, have a local following and make good money without selling CDs.
Cover bands are often local and make good coin without album sales.
Then you have musicians performing children who get paid.
You are never going to be a pop star or a VC rocketship company but few are. But you can make a solid living just performing locally.
He also designed the Netrunner rules that Android: Netrunner was based on, and that had such a committed community that when Wizards pulled the license from FFG, the fans just kept developing the game.
Just a point here, you're talking about MTG Arena, which is the new online game. There's a much older game still called MTG Online which preserves the gambling aspect, where you buy packs and event entries for real money as well as trade cards with other users (and through a number of legitimate third parties, even buy and sell singles for real money). They even go one step further: if you can collect all the digital cards of a set while they have physical product available, you can exchange the digital set for a factory-sealed physical print run of the set (https://www.mtgo.com/en/mtgo/redemption).
I kinda waffle between the two. Arena's my first love for the reasons you mention, but sometimes it's nice to simply buy some singles and throw together a (Pauper) deck for some fun on MTGO Online (especially since their set selection goes much farther back). I never play that one competitively, though. Feels like playing online poker against a community that's been refined down to 100% professional grinders or wannabes.
At least my game jam teams have always focused on what the core game loop is first, built that, then iterated, and my AAA teams have always tried more of an assembly-line approach where there's no game at all until everyone's already feeling the pressure. Because supposedly it's more efficient to pre-plan everything and just trust that it all comes together perfectly (art, level design, system design, engineering, sound, etc) first try rather than leaving time to iterate.
Which kind of makes sense when much of generic management takes its cues from automotive manufacturing (assembly lines, Kanban, etc).