The Methical EQ II dupe story has made it to the mainstream mediaMark Turner writes a piece for the Financial Times about the incident (mentioned previously here), quoting Ted and Josh, among othersTed says: "The phase we're in right now is that everyone is ­trying to apply the proper metaphorThis is terra nova; a lot of these phenomena are frontier phenomena." A programming language and a programming paradigm can shape how we engineer a worldAs with our natural languages perhaps there is a cognitive dimension, but without having to even reach that far it is safe to say that engineering practices establish approaches to problem-solving that bias solutionsThese practices are hard to ignore in especially high-stakes, risk-adverse software development environments.  

Thus our first biq question, can game software development as it is now conducted scale in the face of advances in hardware, appetite for content, and capped costs?

Our story now migrates to *objects*If you have a hurry using of WOW Gold, you may come here and Buy Warhammer GoldThe importance you will acknowledge when you have no Cheap WOW GoldIf Code is the Law in our realm, then the modern conceptualization of code (see Footnote [1]) often aspires to be object-basedThe craft of software objects is then Object Oriented Programming, even if it is only sometimes realizedBy and large, software object-oriented design has been a cultural touchstone for nearly a generation of software developers and designers - objects provide a convenient and intuitive means of partitioning/ decomposing problems and mapping them onto code building blocksChallenges emerge, however, when one scales interactions from small numbers of objects to large sets of objectsThrow in parallel threads of computation and all hell breaks looseWhy the concern with large numbers of objects? Well, that is arguably where gameplay simulation is heading.

This is where Tim's slides enters our stageThey worry a particularly difficult and central problem: how to have large numbers of objects interacting across many threads of computationAnd the expectations in turn influence, or even define, the way participants interpret events and express themselves while participating in that cultureI think people tend to approach online cultures altruistically, a little bit more open to a utopian dream, and that this results in cultures that tend to reinforce those dreams.

 Or did they ignore it? It's just possible that SWG's latest flaming car wreck resulted from deliberately driving over a cliff.

I'm normally deeply suspicious of conspiracy theoriesIn the case of SWG's NGE, though, there are really only two possibilities: that there is a deeper agenda or that the live management team is well beyond cluelessly self-destructive, out in some outer void of fecklessness.