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• Tuesday, December 23, 2008 01:31 PM

  better tools

  There's an analogy that occurred to me as I was reading the article. Bear with me, if you would.

  I work as a 3d artist creating characters for video games. Since I started working in the field, what's possible and therefore what's expected have increased exponentially. However, the amount of money video game companies have to pay artists has stayed about the same. The result is that a model of a level of detail which would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in 1998 now costs a couple of thousand. I get paid the same for carefully modeling each pore in a character's nose that I once got paid for a bunch of chunky blocks vaguely resembling a human form.

  Here's the thing: I can do the model with the pores in about the same time as I used to do the chunky blocks. The software I use to do my job has gotten better. I have better tools now.

  But the tools and the expectations didn't get better in a smooth progression; they leapfrogged. First the computing power increases, because there's some advance in CPU or video cards or game engines. Then the developers demand models that push the new tech to its limits. Then the artists struggle to meet those goals with their old tools, and things look kind of pitiful for a while... maybe the games that came out that year were half old-school models at a fraction of the polycount the engine could handle, and half games with only three models which supposedly represent hundreds of different characters. THEN someone comes out with new software tools that make it possible for the artists to do the higher level models in a reasonable amount of time. Then the hardware improves again and the process starts over.

  It seems to me this leapfrogging occurs with any type of technological progress. Someone invents a way to plow 40 acres in a day; there's a mess while small farms blend into one and people go out of business and populations and economies adjust. And just when things are starting to look normal, someone invents something else and everything shifts again. There is no new technology that doesn't create a new need.

  Right now we have the means of generating the content but limited means of sorting it. That will change. There's no need to panic about the final result when it's so obvious we're not far enough along to more than glimpse it.

  There will be all kinds of unexpected consequences. For example, before the internet, I had no idea there were any people in the world as stupid as Youtube commenters. Seriously! I thought most human beings capable of writing were also capable of coherent thought. Now I know better. The internet has allowed me to get to know my neighbors, and my neighborhood now is the size of the whole planet. I can listen to their music and hear about the times they had their appendices removed and see how they recovered their couches.

  I think it's amazing that I live in a world where I can adopt a Siamese cat and say to myself, hmmm, what do people in Thailand name cats, I wonder? And I can go on the internet and ask a bunch of Thai people what is a good name for a cat. And from there I can learn some things about Thai history and culture, and make a friend who lives in Thailand. Forty years ago, a very well educated person who wanted to learn something about Thai culture would either have to go to Thailand or roll the dice and hope that the local library had something pertinent. Okay, naming the cat isn't directly solving the problems of the world. But to solve any problem, doesn't it help first to know what the problem is, and second, what different people have tried to solve it? And to do both of those things don't you kind of have to communicate somehow?

  I'd also like to comment on the linked article, "Is Google Making us Stupid?" I'd just like to point out that I read that whole article. All of it. And all of David Brin's article on Salon that linked to it. My attention didn't wander except when my husband bothered me to ask where the good scissors were. I also read whole books; in fact, I finished one today. The gentlemen quoted in the article who claim to have lost the ability to focus long enough to read more than a paragraph? It's possible they are just personally dimwitted and not representative of a larger trend.

  —Allie_ Read Allie_'s other letters
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