I've heard that programmers make far more money than the visual artists working in AAA development.

From my experience, this applies to all kinds of development. Right now I'm doing contract work to save up for projects down the road, and it's much easier to find programming work that pays well than production art or even design. I've always appreciated Blow's perspective: "Programming is Easy; Production is Harder; Design is Hardest." But people seem to value it in almost the opposite direction...

It's well worth a thorough read.

Make sure to hit up Ladder of Abstraction if you get the chance. His famous video is simply logical conclusions of the principles he lays out in that article.

Hey Bruno, welcome!

Maybe you should invite them over here then

http://rhondaforever.com/

Whaaaaaaaaaat?! That is amazing! Thank you so, so much for this link

Just a random thought I had - what if, instead of pulling verts to construct a logical volume, a tool was set up so you could instead trace silhouettes with your stylus?  You'd start with your front and side views, but it would let you rotate to any angle and trace the appropriate silhouette.  When rendered, you would see the drawn silhouette, or an interpolation between the closest ones available, depending on how many you drew at different angles.  The result would not be a volume that logically exists in 3D space, but there would be enough information that it would hold together visually from any angle, and it would hold the visual life you get from a manually done drawing.

In computer graphics lingo, this is referred to as an 'imposter,' and is usually rendered as a sprite raster image. I agree it would be cool to have a tool designed for this specific task, especially in vector. Usually how it works in game engines is that they are automatically generated from 3d models.

At a high enough resolution, there's no difference between that and polygonal sculpting. The next/most recent version of ZBrush is supposed to have it.

Thanks for sharing, I've been wanting to check this out for a while now. Hope I get a chance soon...

Yet I want to take on the challenge of ludology sometimes, as if it's the holy grail of gaming to tell through mechanics. But what are the limitations, and what could have been done differently in this specific case?

This challenge is precisely one of the reasons I started an initiative called Meaningful Gameplay: http://www.meaningfulgameplay.com The concept is to explore multiple versions of a small element of a game or videogame and then compare & contrast them to learn how meaning is generated.

The 2nd game jam is happening in 3 weeks, the weekend of May 25th-27th; feel free to join in remotely.

One of the best solutions I've seen to that problem is voxel-based sculpting. I believe 3D Coat is the first to have that feature.

It might be worth checking out, although the interface is still plenty technical. But once you get used to that, the actual act of voxel sculpting is pretty nice in that regard.

I think that's mostly a coincidence currently. This is a pretty obscure community, so most of the participants here are individuals. Furthermore, many of us here are interested in more artistic experiences, so naturally we'll be biased toward more of an auteur-based creative process, if that's what you mean by 'author'.

But like I said, that's just a coincidence.

If you're referring to author in the fictional sense, like a specific authored narrative, I haven't really noticed an overall investment in that concept. There seems to be a variety of stances in that regard.

Agreed, great answer!

People do this spontaneously when stimulated in the right way.

So this sentence says to me that it might be productive to forgo the computer altogether early on and just do random magic tricks and stuff IRL to get a better understanding of how to "stimulate."

Or is this medium so distinct it would be more productive to stay purely virtual? hmm

Also, speaking of addiction, I think in general even if auntie pixelante describes it as a parable on working-class alcoholism:
http://arcaica-pfp.blogspot.com.br/2012/04/anestesia.html

Clay Shirky has an interesting take on the history of alcoholism and it fitting into a much larger context in Cognitive Surplus. The Industrial Revolution brought leisure time. People didn't know how to deal with it, so at first it was wasted: people turned to alcohol. Once we matured some things got a bit better. And then mass media came about. We didn't know how to deal with it, so at first it was wasted: so many TV shows that are shallow and meant only to pass the time. Once we matured some things got a bit better.

He likens our current fascination with lolcats and other often-thought meaningless uses of the Internet to the Information Revolution bringing access to information and communication. We don't know how to deal with it, so likewise, at first it is wasted.

He suggests that we need to simply experiment a lot to gain a better understanding of it, and use that understanding to mature as citizens of the Information Age. Interesting idea.

Lets assume the richness could stay the same while shortening the experience. If you want to look at film as an example, the solution was a better use of editing through a transition from depiction to suggestion. What does suggestion look like in videogames?

Guess beauty is my addiction.

Ha! In pursuit of the sublime...

All the recent research I've heard about (and studied myself) seems to suggest that, as a whole, organized religion is slowly and steadily declining in the Western world. Any growth seems to be within specific sub-groups and is not representative of the whole. But it is clearly growing in the Eastern world.

I actually think we need more of it, but that's because this is my definition: "to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."

But in my opinion these sorts of game experiences have the opposite effect of what the user thinks they're having. Like other forms of addictions, specifically use of drugs, games make players feel that they are opening their mind and learning and experiencing all sorts of new things, while in reality, they are in  fact closing their mind and building walls around their own little world.

Well put! Yeah, Lantz seemed to be referring to games as a sort of "perfect drug." I find that really disturbing. I never figured he would join the segment of the industry that's trying to take games in that direction. What happened to just wanting to make a popular sport?