Digital Extremes wants to break the trend of live-service games meticulously planning years of content ahead of time using road maps…’What happens then is you don’t have a surprise and you don’t have a world that feels alive,’ [community director Rebecca] Ford says. ‘You have a product that feels like a result of an investor’s meeting 12 months ago.'”

— Steven Messner, “This Means War,” PC Gamer, Feb. 2020, p. 34

Video games have been leading indicators for almost forty years. It was back in the early 1980s that games started welcoming modders who altered the visuals, turning Castle Wolfenstein into Castle Smurfenstein, adding maps, levels, cars, weapons, and rules to game after game. Thus the games became more replayable. Thus the games became whatever users wanted to make them. Thus games — the most rule-bound of activities outside of a law court or a tea ceremony — became purposefully unpredictable.

Rebecca Ford is talking about Warframe, but what she says about planning and road maps points the way for what’s happening with business strategies overall. The Internet has not only gotten us used to an environment that is overwhelming and unpredictable, but we’ve developed approaches that let us leverage that unpredictability, from open platforms to minimum viable products to agile development.

The advantage of strategy is that it enables an organization to focus its attention and resources on a single goal. The disadvantages are that strategic planning assumes that the playing field is relatively stable, and that change general happens according to rules that we can know and apply. But that stability is a dream. Now that we have tech that lets us leverage unpredictability, we are coming to once again recognize that strategies work almost literally by squinting our eyes so tight that they’re almost closed.

Maybe games will help us open our eyes so that we do less strategizing and more playing.

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It is fantastic that 14 Paris museums have put images of 150,000 artworks into the public domain. Go take a look. It makes the world visibly better.

But …

…The images are easily accessible one at a time for a human who is browsing. You can also click to download it, and then do whatever you want with it. But they are, apparently purposefully, difficult to batch download. That deprives us of the ability to set computers onto the images and their metadata so that they can discover relationships, and patterns of relationships, among them. That’s a lost opportunity.

I understand it’s hard for institutions to give up on the credit they deserve for maintaining these artworks. Items put in the public domain can be passed around and duplicated without any reference to the source that made them available, or even to the artist who created them. But in return, the culture gets to freely share those images, and to incorporate them into new works, which helps to preserve and extend our shared culture.

So I don’t want to be ungrateful for this enormous gift to the world. But one more step – say, an open API that enables batch download – and the world can benefit even more from these museum’s awesome generosity.

(Hat tip to Keith Dawson.)

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Just over twenty years ago, computer scientists were racing the clock to fix a possibly devastating error brought about by an over-estimation of the pace at which tech becomes obsolete, which is an over-estimation of the pace of change itself. It turns out that one of the two popular solutions to the problem made the same mistake. And now we’re paying for it, but mainly through some annoyances, not the sort of world-stopping calamity that the prior error threatened.

The problem twenty years ago was that software developers had with some frequency thought that storing the year could be done with two digits, so that 1970 would be saved as 70. After all, the program wouldn’t still be used in 2000! Would we also still be driving around on earth-bound cars, or giving poodles ridiculous haircuts? Ridiculous!

But, if those apps were in fact still be used as the new millennium began, then the two digits internally representing the year would be taken internally as 00, which would be likely to confuse a computer that would assume – based on the way numbers work – that 00 (2000) comes before 70 (1970). And 2001 would look like 1901, etc.

One approach developers took to preempt the Y2K (year two thousand) bug was to change the way the programs expressed date data, allotting four digits to the year. We shall call this “the right way.” But it’s more complex than it seems. For example, you may have to find every place in a complex, integrated set of programs where the date is referred to. You may have to recompile ancient code, unearthing compilers from ancient crypts guarded by three-headed dogs. It was a freaking nightmare for many organizations.

The second approach was to write a little code that looked for year dates between 00 and 20, and write an except that takes them as referring to 2000-2020. Most applications aren’t dealing with dates going back to the beginning of the 20th century, so that worked. Chris Stokel-Walter (twitter: @stokel) in his excellent, brief explainer in New Scientist, says that an estimated 80% of Y2K solutions took this approach, known as “windowing”, but which we shall refer to it as the “Please don’t do this” approach.

Well, now it’s 2020 and some indeterminate number of windowed apps haven’t updated the fix. Thus, some traffic meters have stopped working. As Chris writes, “The theory was that these windowed systems would be outmoded by the time 2020 arrived…”

So, exactly the same over-estimation of the pace of tech obsolescence has led to exactly the same problem. Surprise?

It’s not at all clear, however, who has made this mistake. The developers implementing the windowing patch were staving off an imminent, plausible crashing of globally crucial systems. Windowing was a reasonable approach to forestalling this crisis … but only if there was a system – a human system – to remember to allocate resources for fixing the problem that the patch postponed.

Conclusion: “Human system” is an oxymoron.

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This title is the last line of a post from Bix.

Here is the post’s opening:

So, this research from Orbit Media (via Andy McIlwain) should actually be read as a list of all the things we should ignore if we truly want to revive the blogosphere.

Bix’s post is correct.

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