Technology

Deep Speculation on Gaming. Kind of

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Monday, I’ll have an analysis up at Fan To Pro on CES and disruption of gaming.  Well a rant and analysis.  With bullet points.  Anyway its 1200 words of painful insight and sarcasm.

With all the changes in gaming going on, I’ve asked myself what part it plays in my life.  I enjoy it, I grow from it, etc.  But as so many options come before me, I find myself asking what is it for.

This is actually a question many people are going to have to ask with so many options and so many changing options.  Consumer or producer, what gaming is for is going to have to be asked to spend time, money, insight, and throwing birds at pigs appropriately.

The thing is what gaming is for has changed as the scope has expanded.  There are many “non-gamers” who game.  The DS, the Wii, Facebook games, mobile games, etc. have brought in legions of non-gamers into the gamer space – and these people are gamers.  The sphere has expanded.

But what people want and need out of gaming differs along many axes.  We just don’t think about it very much because we treat gaming as all-too-often monolithic.  Sure, it’s not monolithic, but it’s far less of what it’s not now – if you’ll excuse my terrible contortions of language.

So for myself, with options, I have to ask what I get out of gaming and how, out of many options, to pursue it.

Developers, hardware makers, publishers, are going to have to ask what people want and need, and how to deliver it.  They will be unlikely to cover all markets.

Then of course there’s the question of what happens as the omnipresence of games expands . . . but we’ll see how that goes in the next few years.

What is gaming for?

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

Documentation And Fear

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When I started my last job search, I was surprised at how many job interviewed involved me managing documentation.  Surprised not in that a Project Manager needed documentation skills or would oversee documentation projects, but in that someone actually cared.  IT is infamous for poor documentation, so it was nice to see a focus on good documentation.

I’ve wondered if the lack of documentation, record-keeping, and code commenting actually holds back development and innovation.  It’s hard to innovate when you aren’t quite sure what you’re doing at the moment or what people did in the past.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

Publishing: The New Skill

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Published using Nook for the first time for my latest book.  It was about as easy as Kindle, with a few less international options.  That’s pretty promising, as I’d usually have Lulu.com do the job.

It’s still a pain to self-publish merely for the amount of options, platforms, and issues one has to face.  There’s what to put the document in when you write, any conversions you have to make, then what tool to publish it in (I go from Libre Office to Jutoh myself).  It’s nice to be able to self-publish, but I wouldn’t call it simple.

The strange thing is self-publishing is basically it’s own skillset.  It’s not a gateway to easy publishing if you’re a writer since you’ve got to be more than a writer – or hire someone that can do the conversions for you.  Yes, the barrier to entry is far lower, but what was once insurmountable financially or business-wise is still a challenge because you need the skills to self-publish.

Writing well is still never enough.  The barriers and challenges to publishing have changed and even lowered, but they’re still there.  Success is still a lot of work.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.