More academics should try being practitioners
Terra Nova: Arden Slows Down, Takes Breather
Ted says in the comments:
Emphasizing Shakespeare was a mistake. The burdens of a license! Everyone thought it was World of Hamlet and the point was to teach high school kids 2B|~2B. But teaching Shakespeare has always been an ancillary benefit, not the point. I thought it would be cute. But putting Shakespeare in the game, I found, took away resources from fun. Lore, by itself, did not make a fun game. Shakespeare also loaded us up with an entire community of expectations, people who dig the idea of a digital Shakespeare. To those people, I want to say YES, I dig the idea too, but please come up with the $50m it will take to build that world before asking me (AGAIN) when Arden is going to be done. I had $240K and was thrilled to have it. But that’s 1/200th of the money you’d need to do what some of the folks out there had dreamed up. Their dreams became pressure on us, and made me wonder why I didn’t say I was making Arden: World of Actuaries.
21 Responses to “More academics should try being practitioners”
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“Those that can, do. Those that can’t…teach.” – George Bernard Shaw
Heh. Nice to see some respect for, as he put it, “world builders”. In a way, though, the quote at the start of my post applies to games themselves, at least if you insert the word “entertain” after “can”.
Not a lot of entertainment value in educational gaming. There is some, true, but for the most part…”educational games” equals “boring” in quite a few peoples’ minds.
“Lore, by itself, did not make a fun game.” Heh.
Not a commentary on the concept itself, mind you…but Shakespeare has such a large amount of educational and intellectual baggage, it’s almost as bad as trying to make, say, a game on Star Wars or Star Trek. It doesn’t matter how well you do it, there’s always going to be a line of folks ready to explain that Shakespeare was, in fact, left-handed, and you got that wrong! And don’t you know he didn’t like the color red? That was clearly established in….etc, etc, etc.
But you’re right…everyone should try actually doing something before teaching someone else how to do it.
“..those that can’t teach…write sarcastically.” (me).
I don’t think the problem is of academia vs. industry, I think the problem is an asset fetish that many people seem to have. Design experiments don’t really require that much content people.
“I mean… come on.” – Jimmy
Wow, an extraordinary burn-through of resources with little result, making it that much harder for the next person to go to those same wells the next time and draw. I find that irresponsible.
I boggle at the idea of going first to Multiverse…then to Neverwinter Nights?! Is this some sort of bad joke?! Could somebody explain it to me?
He could have gone to Second Life at the start, and done it at a fraction of the cost and time.
Prokofy, shut up.
I applaud this effort and it’s exactly the type of thing they need to keep doing. Yes, it’s irritating when academics use big words when little ones would do and it’s fun to have a laugh at their expense once in a while but someday their deeds will catch up to their words. It did in film. I hope places like the MacArthur Foundation don’t shy away from the next project.
“please come up with the $50m it will take to build that world before asking me again”
Sound’s like a very familiar problem. Don’t do what WOW is doing without thinking it through. In this case, the obvious solution is not the right one because it’s a content trap you can’t win. You need to change your perspective. The innovation that has resulted from the search for the solution to this exact problem has invigorated the VW industry in the last two years. If you look at many new companies in this space and look at how they dealt with this content trap, you’ll see that in many cases it was their solution to this problem that defined them.
Sorry to see a project like that go under, and too bad it couldn’t have had a bit more practicality (design) and made it through…
…but I am very amused at the idea of getting a group of people together to make characters and play _Hamlet_ on WoW…
># Rory said on October 4th, 2007 at 6:28 pm:
Prokofy, shut up.
“Now shall we see/if power change purpose/what our seemers be.” “Measure for measure”.
The other unfortunate downside of this escapade is that game gods will go on gloating now for a long time to come about academics and critics who study their world-making but can’t replicate it.
Also, Shakespeare was a game-god, maybe he was the first maker of the Metaverse.
What I don’t understand is how in the world you can burn through that kind of money building an NWN PW?
“He could have gone to Second Life at the start, and done it at a fraction of the cost and time.”
Profky Neva is a name that I associate with SL, so it’s not surprising to see such a statement. The fact is that you can build a viable persistent world on NWN with no budget at all. The available “stock” content, either provided by Bioware or created by the (large) community is very extensive. If you are exploring ideas, this is enough to let you concentrate on your ideas and not worry about art content.
In the US Academic world, $240k is enough for less than 4 people-years worth of work, if you’re using science graduate students. (You’ll get twice as much effort if you’re using humanities students or undergraduates; if their work was primarily content creation rather than programming, *and* they had good tools, that would be the right call to make. To do NWN scripting, though, you’ll need gifted undergrads or fairly technical grad students.) In industry, it’d probably buy you half that much effort, although your workers would presumably be more experienced and more efficient.
So that’s not an extraordinary burn-through of resources. Even at a second-tier school, anything under $100k is peanuts, and you’re not talking serious, respectable money until you’re over half a million.
Tom, who used to write those grants, and recently left academia to do practitionery things.
“What I don’t understand is how in the world you can burn through that kind of money building an NWN PW?”
Absolutely nowhere does it say that we burned through $240,000 for simply working with NWN. While having the art content was extremely helpful, that wasn’t the reason for the switch.
My apologies to Rory. I had forgotten that this was an academic grant. They run by different rules than “the real world” and as Tom alludes to, a240k grant is quickly absorbed by a couple of graduate students doing masters’ theses. Actually, the granting agency will be elated with their investment if a couple of good papers come out of it.
I think I’ll go palm my face now.
Let’s not take too negative a tone here — my post title was meant with a smile, not as a knock. After all, what he said in the quoted bit above is very much like how developers feel with all “licenses” to some degree.
I think overall, it’s a GOOD thing to see academics be practitioners and vice versa.
I don’t think SL was the right platform for what Ted wanted to do, which was a totally immersive environment. SL by its nature lets stuff from other areas of the world “leak in.” Prototyping in SL may have made more sense than starting with early versions of Multiverse, however.
I completely agree that in academia, that spend isn’t crazy at all.
Raph,
Like many people, you’ve seen too many Daniel Terdiman CNET articles and many other articles that don’t explain the simple fact of life: you can set up an island in second life, or a continent full of islands that no one except your chosen list of people or your group can ever enter, at your invitation only. That shuts it off from all that other stuff that “leaks in”.
It’s so much cheaper and easier to use and so much more user friendly to get students and others involved, that whatever “leakage” you might hypothetically imagine will not be an issue.
And that was indeed my point, that SL is supposed to be good for prototyping. It seems that it is. Maybe it isn’t. But at least it doesn’t cost a lot to use it to prototype.
And I don’t care that in academe, that spend isn’t “crazy”. It still makes it harder for everyone else to go to the same wells.
>Profky Neva is a name that I associate with SL, so it’s not surprising to see such a statement. The fact is that you can build a viable persistent world on NWN with no budget at all. The available “stock” content, either provided by Bioware or created by the (large) community is very extensive. If you are exploring ideas, this is enough to let you concentrate on your ideas and not worry about art content.
But why just use stock content when you could use either existing user-generated content or commission custom content? SL has those same features. I wonder how the gameplay of NWN and its various exigencies of characters and such might get in the way of a free-form story, but you tell me, my understanding is that NWN isn’t some totally open-ended totally user-generated sort of world like LS.
If you want to just concentrate on ideas and not worry about content, the Sims Online is a good place, too. Seriously.
My main complaint about this Shakespeare project is that it was closed. No one could see it. It was limited to the privileged. It was not open. And it was on a platform that was incredibly hard to use, even for programmers. Maybe that was deliberate.
Raph, thanks for support. Based on the Terra Nova post it is easy to jump to the conclusion that Arden has gone down in smoke.
This is not true.
First of all, even without our renewed funding, working from a campus allows us to continue to proceed using all volunteer labor. We have no shortage of talented individuals at Indiana University. Our full time programmer has been extremely valuable, but using Neverwinter Nights the project can still move forward without him.
We are fortunate enough to be able to work with the TerraGrid Super Computing Project @ Indiana. We don’t have to worry about losing our servers or server space any time soon.
Let us not forget that this project has made headway in something beside production. We have place two students directly from the Arden Project into industry work in virtual worlds. One is working with Cisco, and the other with Disney. I imagine we will soon have a third. As a learning experience for students the project has been invaluable.
Sometimes I think what happens is that expectations outrace what is possible. We have learned more than we thought we ever could. We still plan to have an experiment and fulfill our end of the bargain for MacArthur. It’s just going to be delayed until we have a product we feel comfortable with.
Thanks,
Travis
I think overall the ROI was decent. It’s a learning step towards doing something better.
My initial thought was the scope was too ambitious. This kind of project and budget could have been great on the Metaplace platform and perhaps the next stage it will.
If the goal and scope of the next project is to introduce new readers to Shakespeare’s work or allow existing fans to “read between the lines” then the goal and scope will be sufficiently focused to the fun element of the journey.
Franl
>We have place two students directly from the Arden Project into industry work in virtual worlds. One is working with Cisco, and the other with Disney.
So…the purpose of privately-funded academic world-building efforts is to provide feeder tanks for computer or game companies? I suppose that’s legitimate but it seems like an awfully expensive way of preparing game gods.
Intended purpose does not always equal the outcomes reality gives us.
Singling out one sentence of a post to make an accusation of wasting people’s money to benefit companies is really poor, almost trollish.
You don’t think providing opportunities for future developers and designers to learn lessons and work with industry tools first hand is a good thing? You’d prefer for them to be filled with only theory and untested beliefs when sending them out to work on projects who’s budgets put that grant money to shame?
See, anyone can misrepresent. I’d hope you would agree that it only lowers the quality of discussions on this site when that happens.
They learned things, those lessons are going to be shared with others in the industry, now. That is how higher education works. How many seemingly insignificant and wasteful projects have taken place in academia where members of the team learned some obscure but ultimately critical lesson? I’d just throw out a random guess of somewhere in the hundreds of thousands.
First its making the lawyers who dare to suggest oversight into the devil. Now its painting academics as wasteful and careless in their pursuit of petty goals….because they didn’t use Second Life. Who is next on your crusade and why do you have to wage it on this blog?
Don’t know about Raph, but I imagine people bringing Main Grid content onto those “private” islands, thus causing the same problem that led Wells Fargo to relocate Stage Coach Island to ActiveWorlds.
Last I checked, that sort of “leakage” is still possible. Maybe I’m wrong, but I suspect they wouldn’t want a virtual Nissan vehicle or Herman-Miller office chair showing up in their world.
The only real surprise for me was their move to NWN; wasn’t aware they’d given up on using Multiverse.
Prokofy…
I’ve been biased against using SL for research games, but my experience in SL has been limited. Can you suggest existing islands/sims we could check out which are controlled and gamey or simulationy that might change my (and others) minds?
@Timothy – I’ll be looking forward to an answer to your question since I don’t believe that level of isolation is currently possible.
However, it’s worth watching LL’s ongoing server-side developments, as I believe that level of control may be available in the not-to-distant future; part of their “grid of grids” effort.