[MUD-Dev] R&D

[Sean Kelly]

On Wed, 29 May 2002, Zach Collins (Siege) wrote:
> On Tue, 28 May 2002, Dave Rickey wrote:
 
>> In terms of MMOG-specific R&D, if I was making hiring decisions
>> I'd have a statistical sociologist and a social psychiatrist on
>> staff, and data-gathering tools built into the system for them.
>> But it's hard to explain what those disciplines have to do with
>> making games.
 
> It's rather easy.  Designing content and marketing the game.
> Answering the questions that come up on this very list all the
> time.

Now try justifying that to a business executive who doesn't really
understand games but who holds the company's purse-strings.  It's
similar to trying to justify a large expenditure in network security
or redundancy to the same person.

Here's a useful axiom:

  "The more difficult it is to provide a direct correlation between
  an expenditure and a profit, the less likely that expenditure is
  to be approved."

It's no wonder the y2k problem wasn't addressed until practically
1998, even by utilities in some cases.


Sean

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