“You’d walk around the office and one guy would be watching hangings on YouTube, another guy would be looking at pictures of murder victims, someone else would be watching a video of a cow being slaughtered,” they said. “The scary part was always the point at which new people on the project got used to it. And I definitely hit that point.”
In case it wasn’t obvious before, the best part about The Hobbit is its setting. It’s the same world as Lord of the Rings and the same world as Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. As with any movie I’ve ever seen, there are countless shots that do not, in fact, occur in those great books, but do instead occur in The Hobbit, which takes place within The Hobbit itself. That means each movie is like one long trip from that point, or from the start of one film down to the middle, with the main focus of the entire journey being as the two individuals embark upon a journey where no one can leave them alone, at least until the end.
I had the pleasure of meeting with Mark Gatiss to discuss his new book, “The Hobbit,” during the Comic Con expo here at San Diego Comic-Con. That said, I have to ask, why did you decide to write the story for The Hobbit? What were you hoping to accomplish with it? And why does the tone of The Hobbit seem so fresh again?
Well, it’s almost impossible to explain when you’re trying to do the Hobbit as a science fiction book, but actually I was going to write that book for a long time already, right up until the moment I wrote “The Lady with the Dragon Tattoo.” The idea there, to me, was that there should not be a single book about “Mordor.”
Now it’s not as simple as that. It’s still about the Middle-earth — it still takes place in the country of Middle-earth — but a lot of people have said it’s an alien setting. And there’s been some discussion about, does it affect things like the war, or how Tolkien’s version of war works? But that’s an interesting point, that there’s an aspect of the Middle-earth that can be different but not necessarily a different kind of place, and Tolkien has written many stories about these things because he thinks they ought to. It’s a very similar concept to my book, where while we’re making Thor that we could write a lot about the “Dwarves,” or it could be about elves, or about dwarves. But we’re also writing about the orcs.
I was not alone in my journey to Mordor. As president of the Evolution Institute, I had the capacity to organize a conference in 2009 funded by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), followed by a series of four workshops under NESCent’s “working group” rubric, which resulted in a 2013 special issue of the Journal of Economic and Behavior Organization titled “Evolution as a General Theoretical Framework for Economics and Public Policy”.
I got a lot of interesting responses to my earlier post asking why game development works as well as it does (including one via email rather than tumblr). Thanks.
There were some clear recurring themes in the responses:
1. Engines and other game development middleware / tools are very sophisticated, and selling these things (rather than games themselves) is lucrative so they have the polish of full-blown products (as opposed to projects someone hacked together to make their life easier while doing something else)
2. Games are all similar enough to one another, even on a 10+ year timescale, that nontrivial problems can be definitely solved and the solutions stick around (as tools or best practices) rather than becoming obsolete; good game programmers often have deep expertise acquired over that same 10+ year timescale, which simply isn’t possible to have with the latest web framework or whatever
3. Game studios do a relatively large amount of manual QA, and do it relatively early and often
4. Advantages related to the relative “frivolity” (not sure if that’s the right word) of games: they take place in invented worlds that can be modified for maximal convenience to the programmer, and the “cost function” associated with bugs is a lot fuzzier and more forgiving – how much a bug matters is quantified by how much it detracts from the entire experience, which will frequently be “not that much,” and there aren’t many components that simply must work exactly as specified or you’re in legal hot water or w/e
5. Simple abundance of resources: lots of programmers per game, game programmers (compared to other programmers) accept lower wages and are more committed to the job as an all-consuming lifestyle
Some comments below.
1+2 feel like a coherent package, and 3+4 feel like a different coherent package. (I’m not especially interested in 5, although I’m sure it’s true, because it doesn’t provide any transferable insights for non-game software work, which is what I’m looking for here)
1+2 are about game development having mature tools at a high level of abstraction, sort of like the difference between higher- and lower-level programming languages. If I’m understanding correctly: game developers can work with relatively high-level primitives right out of the box, and so there’s less of an abstraction gap between design and development – the designers think in terms of a sort of palette of high-level abstractions like “there’s a character, they have these stats, they have the ability to walk around and equip swords” and the developer can, to a relatively large extent, just plop things like Characters™ with Walk Actions™ and Equip Actions™ into place, with all the customizability the designer expects from such things.
This sounds true and explains a lot if so, but I still feel confused as to why it’s true. Are games really this much more standardized than, like, I dunno, shopping websites?
3+4 feel like they’re about treating the thing you’re creating as a messy emergent system, letting yourself be relatively free to throw in new pieces that affect or depend on existing pieces without explicitly thinking through the combinatorial explosion of possible states and interactions, and instead determining whether the whole thing works by just having people constantly try to use it as you’re developing it. I can see why this would be unusually compatible with the game domain, since there are fewer parts that simply cannot be allowed to fail, and you have more freedom to fix bugs by changing the design (“things broke when character X equipped item Y, so we’ll make up some reason they can’t do that”).
Still, I do find myself wondering if other things couldn’t be a little more like this. In my (limited! extremely limited!) experience it seems like the median experienced programmer has heavily internalized the idea that freedom will always bite you in the end, that you should bind yourself with every constraint you can think of that doesn’t literally render the current task impossible. There is a lot of wisdom in this attitude, but it can sometimes amount to a restrictive obsession with defending against every mistake and worst-case-scenario you can currently think of – when in reality, a lot of the dangers you anticipate will simply never happen (or won’t end up mattering), and a little freedom might end up being a blessing when the dangers you haven’t anticipated inevitably arrive.
The makers of Sesame Street are angered by the association, saying in a statement that it was “outraged” by the teaming of the apparently benign children’s TV character with the prime suspect of the 11 September attacks on the United States.
