We talk to the illusion of a world with many concurrent activities and a speak least metaphorically, to the agencies that can live in such places (e.g. of Non-Player-Characters and Player-Characters interacting with shared world state). In the fact of today, however, such parallelism is a fiction - most games are implemented within a single simulation thread (they just iterate through all the objects quickly but in sequence... "butcher before baker before the cat jumps over the moon..."), but this is likely to change, perhaps very soon.
A question for the future is how to implement larger simulations with more objects. In a Gamespy.com article a while ago, Tim Sweeney stated that while the last ten years of programming progress were about objects, the next ten years will be about "ecosystems of objects." Buy SWG Credits keep your high power. And technology is moving away from an engineering-style application of linear rationality to solve problems. As we are really have available stock of Cheap WOW Gold. They looked friendly enough--at least, no one had fruit ready to throw at us. It was simply kind of surreal, after reading the comments on TN this past week and hearing other things at the conference about the problems with game studies and developer/academic relations.
After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger. Someone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted points. Ian made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic research. While I'm not going to say that what we've done personally has no value, it was a definite challenge to try and make it *directly relevant* in a BULLETED POINT for developers. And there are huge gaps in what we don't know. Where is the research about sports games, to take just one example? Anyway, the point is, I enjoyed the exercise, and learned a lot from it. I hope the audience did as well.
But overall, I like to think that the attendance demonstrates that developers are interested in what academics might be able to tell them (again I will point out: no fruit was thrown). And all week, I talked with developers who were interested in what was going on with research, from the smallest to the largest companies. Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.You would get more than you though with owning Cheap SWG Credits. One problem looking forward is how to work reliably with game simulation objects in parallel (see "concurrency"). As he points out, the approach of today using mainstream programming languages is to manually synchronize object state - a developer has to explicitly lock/unlock the bits of the object and figure out how it should share with other objects ("shared state concurrency"). This won't scale - it is too error prone and too complicated to implement over large object sets. It is also expensive (skilled developers). Thus, we stand at the edge of the abyss looking to worlds feared with plains of bugged tribbles.
Beyond software engineering there too have been subtler claims favoring parallelized code. Assuming tools and practices catch up (a big if), can it lead to more fine-grained definitions of game simulation behavior? A cynic might suggest that this is rhetorical posturing.) What of them? At first they may migrate to games that still ban trading, but my guess is that these games will use the cover of Sony's first move to institute similar marketplaces. The big commercial operators need every penny they can get, and they're unlikely to hold off building their own version if Sony is successful. As Ren suggests, this would seem to provide the ideal opportunity for a smaller game dev to institute a genuine ban on asset trading, in an effort to capture the disaffected role players. This will be interesting because it will be a moderately-controlled experiment in whether players really want to role play at all. My prediction (for what it's worth) is that this non-tradable game will die, because the players who claim role-playing is important actually don't believe this.
Interesting times.