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leebmx

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I won't believe it!

So I am on page 19 of the NeoGAF thread which started as a result of the Skullgirls article Patrick wrote this week. Mostly it is a fascinating breakdown of how games are made, especially the laborious, time-consuming dedication that goes into making a hand-drawn 2D fighting game. I have learnt a lot. However it is also a revealing insight into how opinions are formed and how 'common sense,' is generally nothing of the sort .

When I first heard the the $150k figure I wasn't really sure whether it was a lot of money or not. I generally don't like forming my opinions until I have some idea of the facts, so I waited until I had read the article and then decided that $150k seemed like quite a fair figure, probably even a little cheap. Way back in the mists of time I took a philosophy degree, and while I can't say I remember a great deal specifically about who said what during the 3000 years or so of Western thought, having spent most of the 3 years at university surgically attached to the end of a bong, the main thing the lectures and seminars I did attend impressed on me was the importance of understanding a topic before offering an opinion and never, ever, venturing a point of view based on instinct or gut feeling. Despite only scraping a 2:2 in a subject seemingly hand-tailored for long term unemployment I am grateful for this one little insight I gleaned, because reading that Gaf thread has made me realise how much we tend to argue from feeling or instinct rather than evidence or understanding and how reluctant we are to change these unreasoning viewpoints even when faced with conclusive evidence to the contrary.

The thread, for those you who haven't read it is a startling blend of eye-opening insights into how game development works, with posts from at least two developers of Skullgirls, and eye-opening stupidity from posters who feel the developers are either spendthrift idiots or running some sort of scam. The figures for the developments costs are broken down quite clearly in Patrick's original article, which is backed up by some big cheeses of the developement world (and Dave Lang) and in the thread we get even more detail about exactly how much everything costs. They show quite clearly that the designers were getting paid about $600 a week for 70-100 hours, a terrible wage for people with such skills.

Yet the thread is littered with people who think the overall cost is far too much. Why is this? I think at first it is understandable in a way. For someone, like me, with no real knowledge of game development $150k can sound like a great deal of money for one character. What gets harder to understand is how people continue with this point of view after all the facts of the contrary are laid out in front of them. There is only one poster in the whole thread who after reading arguments to the contrary, and charmingly, drawing his own character to see how long that would take (2.5 hours and apparently it takes around 4500 frames for one complete character) who has his viewpoint changed.

This to me is terrifying. It scares me so much that so many people have such an unshakeable faith in their own instincts and 'common sense,' rather than an analytical view of the facts. Perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised as the world is full of prejudice, paranoia, and irrationality, but it is hardly like this is a debate around a heated issue like race or human rights - it's basically very simple economics. However, so many posters are still utterly reluctant to be shifted from the viewpoint which first popped into their heads, probably on seeing the headline to either the thread or Patrick's original article.

The best example of how this chain of thought works this is a poster who gets into a debate with the CEO of the company. His thought process starts at being surprised at the cost (a comment he makes a number of times) and never moves on from that. Despite being presented with reams of evidence that $150k is reasonable amount, he firstly claims that bad management must be to blame, then that not enough 'fat' has been trimmed, then that they should use tools which makes coding and animating quicker and ends up saying that they should have invented some piece of equipment which just makes everything faster and cheaper. Anything other than accept the facts and change that 'feeling' which was the first thing to enter his head.

Its generally not worth writing something this long and in-depth about what people say in a forum thread on the internet, but I thought it was so interesting how people are so prepared to form views about something they know nothing about and then be utterly reluctant to change them or even consider something different. How much of our views are based on this kind of non-reasoning and how much can we actually trust our own points of view? I try quite hard to have an open mindset on most things but I wonder how much of my opinions are based on a gut feeling around which I have tried to build supporting walls of hand-picked facts. Everyone thinks they have an open mind, thinks their views are composed of clear reason thought and deduction but I doubt it. Even myself I wonder, how much of what I believe in was something I decided, (or was decided for me) many years ago and is now so much a part of me that changing it is like stepping out into the street with strange new haircut, or going to a party where there is nobody I know. It is a very difficult thing to ignore that part of you that instinctively says 'I don't like that,' or 'that must be wrong,' you need to be a strong self-confident person to challenge and change your own point of view. Anyone who spends any time in the real or virtual world (especially the anonymous virtual one) will see how many opinions are thrown around and never really thought about. This small debate has made me want to understand a bit more and talk a little less.

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