Scott Hartsman - Off the Record

My main computer died about a week ago, which is the reason for the lack of posting. For the record, it’s a Dell.

I’ve been using them for hardware fairly exclusively over the past ten years, ever since switching from Gateway back in the late ’90s.

At the moment, the building that I’m in has no fewer than eight systems with Dell logos on them. The last startup that I did was also Dell-powered, as was the last large-company job that I had.

In dealing with a number of large technology companies over the past years, a predictable pattern emerges:

1. If they consistently do well by me, I eventually become a huge fan of whatever service it is they’re providing. Back in the early Gateway days, I even had a Gateway-gamers community help mini-site that I ran on the side. (Hey, everyone needs a hobby.)

2. As do many other people. The company succeeds and ends up expanding considerably. Fans rejoice.

3. As a result, they end up needing to do That Thing They’re Good At on a much larger scale.

4. Eventually, they grow so large to where they can leverage their dominance by exploring new ways of maximizing shareholder value. Tragically, most choose to do so in ways that are harmful to consumers:

• incomprehensible telephone contact systems
• gimmicky partnerships that have a net negative effect on the customer
• decreasing value of warranty support
• lower overall quality of company support (never the fault of the people who actually talk to customers for a living - these people generally deserve unfailing politeness, regardless of how poor/frustrating the overall experience becomes - It’s the organization that’s failing them as well, hence this article’s title)
• shipping used products and components to unwary or unknowing consumers
• comically bad upsells
  • I just gave you a chunk of money for a warranty extension and am paying you another chunk of money for a replacement part that will arrive in worse shape than the one I’m replacing. It has taken me three hours and seven department transfers to do so.
  • No, I do not wish to buy a new stick of RAM, a larger hard disk, or upgrade to Vista right now. (At least we both found it hilarious that you had to ask those questions.)

5. People still use said service, but do so more out of habit, until Something happens that incenses them enough to find a replacement

• (Wonder what that could be…)

6. People find a new service to replace the old one, and the cycle continues.

Extending it out past technology, is this the fate of all organizations that have “won” their corner of the game?

I don’t think it has to be, but it seems to be a common sign of anyone operating a large scale business in the 21st century who has wholly failed to transition from a product company to a service company.

If I had one thing to say to any of them, in any industry, it would be this.

• Your product is, or will become, a commodity. It’s the service, stupid.

After having Dell screw up the fourth thing with regards to this particular repair, it occured to me that I’m at the same point with them that I was at with Gateway so many years ago.

Dear Dell,

Glad I could help make you a huge success in whatever microscopic way that I was able to. I did thoroughly enjoy evangelizing some of the cooler things you’ve done over the past years. Alas, it’s time we went our separate ways.

It’s not me — It’s you.

- Scott

Any suggestions for where to go next? Is anyone happy with the systems they buy, or are we down to buy-from-the-hugest, or build-it-yourself as the only remaining options?

Mac folks: I promise that I will try one just as soon as they give me the option to press keys like Alt-F to activate the File menu, and have accelerator support built in by default, or at least as something I can enable, system-wide. To some of us, saving files is hardwired as: Alt-F, S, and so on.

(Yes, my Mac-converted friends all laugh at me for this. You are more than welcome join them in doing so in the comments below.)

Adam Martin helpfully and subtly pointed out that the RSS feed from this site is only showing summaries of the posts when viewed in certain readers or when viewed raw by Firefox.

Sites that use “click here to read the rest” get on my nerves, too.

I’d only ever proofed it in Sage before. Bluntly, I didn’t even know the “/feed” url existed.

(This is the kind of professional blogger I am: I unpack a tarball, assume that Wordpress isn’t actually using my host to support terrorism,  periodically pound my head into the keyboard, and every three months accidentally hit the Publish button bringing you the valuable content that you see before you now.)

For the elite six of you who read this: Let me know if it’s broken or not for your reader - Happy to look into fixing it if it’s annoying anyone.

Over the years I’ve had a few friends begin to learn programming. Occasionally, one of them will find me for help.

I can tell whenever one of them starts out in their first C++ classes, because I start getting asked questions about iostreams, and the questions are almost always about use of esoteric manipulators.

People are intimidated that they’re never going to be able to understand all of the arcane complexities of this built-in system that’s taught to them on day one, which they assume their future livelihood may depend on.

A line and a half of code from one of our servers jumped out at me just now.

They’re reasonably indicative of all of the professionally-created C++ projects I’ve ever worked around.

Here you go:

    // iostreams can suck it
    FILE* fp = fopen( ...

To anyone who asks in the future: You’re safe, guys. Just make it through the class.

…and got a number of truly terrible grades, while at the same time learning programming on my own and succeeding.

The motive to do that? Tearing apart and tweaking with computer games.

via MetaFilter: A Mathematician’s Lament

“…if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done — I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.”

The .pdf in the giant link is long, but the story on its first page is worth a read in itself. I bet it rings profoundly true with more than just me.

I eventually did enjoy math. But as in the story, that came much later in college. The enjoyment definitely occurred despite all of my previous education — Not because of it.

PowerPoint deserves its own private little roped-off area of hell, right next to Project.

If you enjoy playing MMOs, there’s a potential future in which you shouldn’t want to, either.

Another one of the more interesting sessions at IMGDC was (coincidentally) also put on by Dr. Bartle: “Government Interference: How much [pain] can you take?”

The session presented a number of hypothetical situations, some more potentially possible than others, aimed at finding out at exactly what levels of “involvement” would cause us to make the call to just plain throw in the towel.

His initial posting is linked below and my reply is inlined.

Link: TerraNova: The Point Of No Return

This was a great talk. Scary, but an interesting (I hope) intellectual exercise.

MMO developers have to be at least part masochist in order to thrive in the unique challenges of our chosen environments: business, technical, operational, and across nearly every other axis related to MMO development.

Devs are sometimes perceived as simply not wanting to give up any amount of control, or as people who enjoy screwing with others’ experiences as little tin gods of their own worlds, and so on, which is a view that’s both unfortunate and simplistic.

The big threshhold for me wasn’t related to anything like that. Bring on new ways of thinking, as long as the net effect is an added value to the customer experience as a whole.

However, in the hypothetical world where:

• Virtual goods have real world value.
• Players own the virtual goods, instead of having rights to use them
  • …causing volumes of property law to come into play
• Where I am liable for changes in value in a customer’s now-owned, real-world-valued item
• In which I can not alter the game in any meaningful way that affects said goods’ value
  • Whether that’s via releasing an expansion, or buffs/nerfs, or an unfortunately introduced dupe bug.
    • It’s not just “nerfs” - Improving item/class A causes an implicit devaluation of items/classes B-Z.
• That takes place in a world where value now implies that item-drops, xp rewards, et al, are gambling
  • …making us subject to gambling regulations as well
• Where I can’t push the liability for potential changes in value downstream

I might as well be in the business of making securities trading software on Wall St. or slot machine software in Nevada, both of which when taken individually, are regulated far less than the Worst Of Both Worlds hypothetical above.

Practically speaking, there are plenty of places in which a developer can build either of those, make quite a bit more money in the process, and work far more sane hours.

Of course, in our spare time, I imagine many of us would still make online games, just because the act of making them remains fun.

We just couldn’t let anyone else play them.

Yeah. Let’s not go there.

I don’t necessarily see this worst-of-both-worlds scenario actually happening, but this wouldn’t be the first time that I’ve been accused of having a hair too much faith in humanity, as is the case with so many developers - We just want to entertain.

…to bring you this interview with Ten Ton Hammer from IMGDC last weekend.

The conversation was all over the map and has some info on how we’ve been spending the last few months.

Cameron did a great job cleaning up an hour’s worth of empassioned tangents.

One thing that I either said wrong or got lost in translation: At the time we left our previous jobs, we did have a specific direction in mind and began heading there straight away. Some of our seemingly random experimentation has been a result of confirming or discarding parts of a larger plan. Others have been entirely random: “Hey! This Looks Neat…”

If you want to play with the Facebook app/game/toy/thing that’s mentioned in the article, you can find it here. It’ll happily generate either positive or insulting messages to send your friends.

One of the hypotheticals that Richard Bartle brought up in his IMGDC keynote was in the context of a cautionary tale of bringing too much commerce and too “light” of experiences to the MMO space.

The theory went: Given that people’s first experience with an MMO tends to frame how they view everything else from then on, if we introduce future players to the space with too much to sell them in worlds that don’t have enough depth to them, are we risking them not finding the experiences as intriguing as they are those of us who occupy those spaces in this generation, and have enjoyed them thoroughly in the past?

The old-guard developer in me nods emphatically at that thought, but after thinking about it on returning home, I’m not as sure.

While I was in the middle of assisting another progress bar in its epic journey from Left to Right yesterday, a friend and I found ourselves laughing at a subtle, modern reference on an item description that neither one of us had stopped to read before. (For the record it was: “This is my booterang. There are many like it, but this one is mine.”)

That example is a far cry from (say) a 2d, commerce-specific world like a Habbo Hotel, of course, but I realized that moments like that are what I play these games for now - If we can both laugh about something like that from 2000 miles away, and I find the experience now just as entertaining as I did back in the old days, is it any less of an experience?

It is a different one, for certain, but in a way it seems even more personal, since sharing that humor also implies a real-life connection to knowing where this friend and I both heard that quote, on top of the shared world-specific knowledge.

That’s an element of humor that likely wouldn’t have existed in MMOs ten or even five years ago. In ways such as that, the MMOs that we have today are already considerably lighter than the ones that I started out with.

Did I trade one indescribable thing for one that’s a little more describable?

As long as I’m entertained by the experience, having fun with friends, does it matter?

What do you think? What is the indescribable “thing” that attracts you to MMOs? Has it changed over the time you’ve played?

Do you feel like you’ve actively lost something in the process, or do you feel that you’ve seen your tastes evolve a little?

As for me, I’m still not sure, but it’s something that I’m going to be keeping a closer eye on now.

Thanks, Richard.