eHarmony Pimps the Virgins Again

Game Modders' Survey Now Closed

I had some preliminary results up, but Survey Monkey alerted me to the likelihood that a fraudster hit my survey and took it over 20 times. Survey Monkey is working with me on it, but until I get those responses out of the results I can't do anything. (This also means I can't yet run the drawing for the Amazon gift certs, although those were apparently enough of a draw to lure in the unwanted fraudulent respondent.) Sucks. This person is not a modder, they are a fraud! Boo! You have been caught and will not be "winning" a gift certificate (winning in your case equals cheating). Everyone ELSE did not cheat, and I am really honored that they all took my survey.

I have used the HTML comment tag to make it so you won't see the previous and now-invalid write-up, but you can view the page source if you really want to see it. If the fraudster answered "male" every time (I don't know yet), then the male-female ratio will be severely distorted (with the fraudster, it was 33F/109M, so maybe it's more like 33F/85M).

Well, it is internet, I knew this might happen, I just didn't think it would.

Edit: Or, bummer, almost all of the female responses were from the fraudulent respondent. Perhaps the findings from this survey, once the data is cleaned up (amazing what some people do), will show that the % of women who mod is more in line with the % from the IGDA survey (10% or so, mentioned in the part I have now commented into invisibility).

Game Modders' Survey: 100+!

I would like to thank all the respondents who have completed the game modders' survey, since as of this afternoon over 100 people have completed it! Awesome! Thank you everyone! (117 as of right now!)

If you are a game modder and would like to take the survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Y7DRNL5

The survey runs until Oct. 19th.

If you aren't a game modder but want to look at the survey, this link will put your responses in a different "collector" so you can peruse the questions: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7LQP9GT

It is really awesome to see that 117 people will complete a survey from some random person (me) who they don't know. And, it's about modding, which is very exciting stuff (mods are cool, modding is making and playing and usually there is a sharing element to it so there's a community angle -- modding is a the middle of the Venn diagram of several awesome and important things).

Hopefully I can get it analyzed and written up for ICA, due Nov. 1st, that's the plan.

Because Fun is Important

Fun. It's important. It's enjoyment, it's learning, it's playful, it's related to sharing which relates to community, I would say it's everything but I just said design was everything (although I'm sure the two are related).

Let's play connect the dots:

1. Because it's fun.
2. Because it is fun.
3. Just for fun.

Which we will give context to with some sources:

1. "Bob, why do these bears play?".... "Because it's fun." (Italics in original.) Stuart Brown's convincing and moving book, Play, from p. 28, about why bears play (the book is about play and much more than bears, which are just a few pages). Brown is an MD and a play researcher; in other words, he's an expert and knows what he is talking about. (A national bestseller.)
2. From a small survey of computer game modders, one respondent's answer to "WHY do you take spend your time and effort into developing an idea on how to make the game better and/or developing some user-generated content?" 
3. The title to Linus Torvalds' book about why he started what became linux and why he codes.

I keep insisting that this is deeply-rooted human behavior and I get academic reviews by people who have no idea what I am talking about, look, people, it's all the same.

Steve Jobs and Design

Design is really an important part of the Steve Jobs story, and it isn't one that a lot of people understand. Some do. So, although it isn't an understanding that comes quickly or easily--it's more like riding a bicycle, you have to learn it by doing and falling over sometimes--it is one worth understanding.

So, here's a NYTimes article on Jobs and design, and here's the text of Jobs' Standford address from 2005, where he discusses calligraphy, and lastly here is one about Jobs and what is not there in terms of design, called ma, or what is not there, which I think is a vital part of the picture (the author of that article, Jeff Yang, explains it well).

Everything is design, design is everything.

Steve Jobs, 1955 - 2011

I only saw Steve Jobs once, since I didn't live in the right places or do the right things to meet with him or see him at a Keynote. I saw him at the NeXT building, in 1993 or so, and he was running a meeting. I remember the building had a cool glass staircase in the middle, just like many Apple stores do today. So I don't have any stories about Steve Jobs, but I do have a story about the Macintosh, interfaces, and understanding the Mac, because Steve got it, and a lot of other people didn't.

Freshman year I got my first Mac, a Mac Plus. Previously we'd had a family Apple IIc, which was awesome. The Mac was so different at first I didn't even really know how to use it. One following year, perhaps sophomore year, as a computer room TA I attended a meeting where the new student computer lab was announced, or something like that. This wasn't the computer science computer lab, but the one where students would all write papers (amusing, there used to be computer labs where the only things students did on computers was write papers). The person in charge announced that the only computers in the lab would be brand-new IBM PS/2 (somewhat strangely, Sony would later use the same name, at least as spoken, for their second Playstation, but really almost no one remembers IBM's little odd computer line).

I knew this was a horrible decision, so much so that I had a look of shock on my face. I probably would have forgotten this entire event, except the computer person looked at me and said, "You're a Mac person, aren't you?" somewhat smugly.

The problem was Macs cost more -- in the immediate, this financial quarter, short term view.

But what I knew was that the GUI that Apple had started to make viable was the future, and needed to be the present, and that the DOS-based world of IBM and Microsoft was on its way out.

Instead of a GUI, which is vital for word processing -- think of formatting like centering, italics, and bold, all the things that students do in papers -- we got... some hackneyed CLI and a word processing program with an almost unusable interface. This means the TAs were always busy answering the same formatting questions, and students wasted thousands of minutes sitting there trying to figure out the command for italics or save.

There was no mouse (actually, there might have been, but a mouse without a GUI is somewhat stupid). There were no menus. What you saw had nothing to do with what you got. I don't remember exactly, but text in italics was probably highlighted a little. Text in bold, perhaps moreso. To find any command, instead of using an easy menu-system, there was the horrible set of function keys. If you're old enough you'll remember those horrible plastic templates that you had to put over the function keys to see how to get any command you needed. F4 did something, shift-F4 something else, ctrl-F4 a third thing... Probably alt-F4 and maybe even alt-shift... An entire massive template, with tiny text and absolutely no order to the commands at all.

The computer lab was horrible for both students and TAs. The college's computer buyer had no idea about computers, she only knew about the bottom line for that term. I knew what it should be, because Steve had showed me: he a vision, he pushed for it, and made it happen.

Later, I had a NeXT cube for a while. Even with an 040 processor (after-market) and only four colors (black, white, and 2 greys), there was a great ease and simplicity to the design of the GUI. Not a simplicity of poverty, but one that gave you everything. I think this is what people are talking about when they talk about how Steve Jobs knew to focus on what to take away, and what wasn't there.

XKCD's tribute:

Game Modders Survey - Live!

My Game Modders Survey is now live, through Oct 19. Are you a game modder? I would like to learn more about your sense of community and your motivations. Your help is awesomely appreciated, and, three random respondents will win $20 Amazon gift cards.

My survey has already been picked up by my friend Clay over at Sports Mogul, which is a great help.