GDC Day Three: Butter Pats

 Posted by (Visited 5652 times)  Game talk
Mar 262006
 

Jerry Paffendorf has blogged about the really really fantastic conversation that around six of us had at dinner at Teske’s. He’s got photos too.

  4 Responses to “GDC Day Three: Butter Pats”

  1. Faith says:
    March 26, 2006 at 12:09 pm

    […] Comments […]

  2. Michael Chui says:
    March 26, 2006 at 2:16 pm

    I liked how your similar posts module linked Chef.

  3. Flint Dille says:
    March 28, 2006 at 6:47 am

    Great book. Sorry I didn’t read your Amazon blog until after GDC. Was there and mostly ditching panels except my own. Should have ditched that one.

    Keep it up.

    Flint

  4. Tess says:
    March 28, 2006 at 8:17 pm

    Jerry! Man, the last time I saw him was… at a barbecue in Berkeley, I think. That was a fun time. Buried pig for all!

    And, I continue to be fantastically bummed about not making it to GDC this year. Ugh.

    “We got into a looong and interesting conversation about the relative importance of learning the detailed inner workings of computers and code versus being able to functionally and intuitively use them.”

    And a topic that is near and dear to me, too!

    Ellen Ullman writes a lot about stripping machines back down to the bare metal to understand them better, and how we techies have become too complacent and distant, and have forgotten how all the nuts and bolts work.

    I’m not really the one she needs to preach to, because I still find all of the modern whackiness a bit hard to use. While I use Visual Studio, I’m still more comfortable just typing my code into a good old vi window. When an IDE drops a closing paren or bracket in front of me, I invariably trip over it. *BAF* I used to write code you had to debug with an oscilloscope. Damn whippersnappers.

    I’m okay with the fact that most people don’t understand the inner workings of computers. It keeps me continuously employable. However, I do think that programmers (and to a lesser degree, other people involved in software development) benefit immensely from understanding the low-level. See, here’s one thing I’ve learned from many years of development: Intuition needs to be programmed. Your subconscious is a brilliant, brilliant thing. It’s very good at coming up with magical answers for you. I often come up with correct solutions to problems while I’m in the shower, and am completely unable to back-engineer the train of thought that one would have brought me there. Just the other day, I suddenly arrived at a solution for an immensely difficult problem, while making peanut butter toast.

    But none of this would be possible, if I hadn’t fiddled with machines long enough for my brain to make the necessary connections to process this stuff in the background. Every eureka moment — every lightbulb — is the result of the brain puttering about in the cluttered basement of your accumulated experience in that problem space, while you’re busy thinking about food, or music, or sex. The more cluttered the basement is, the sooner your brain will trip over the answer, and smash its nose on the bicycle you had when you were five. Ow! Oh!

    So, in my usual non-pithy, and entirely too wordy way, complete with digressions into peanut butter toast, I’m basically saying, I agree. I think.

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