09 Dec, 2009, Kline wrote in the 2nd comment:
No.
I like tinkering with MUDs and programming in general to teach myself things and challenge myself. Given the frustrations I experience with my "hobby" at times I most certainly would not want to do it for a career :).
That said, I do work in IT in general, and enjoy what I do very much.
I like tinkering with MUDs and programming in general to teach myself things and challenge myself. Given the frustrations I experience with my "hobby" at times I most certainly would not want to do it for a career :).
That said, I do work in IT in general, and enjoy what I do very much.
09 Dec, 2009, quixadhal wrote in the 3rd comment:
Even if I weren't unemployed at the moment, yes. :)
I've done enough IT jobs where I had zero creative control, and little enough input. Assuming this were a real job, that paid a wage that was comparable to other programming jobs, and offered benefits as you'd expect from a regular job, I see no reason not to. I wouldn't expect the same level of wages as an Oracle DBA, but as long as it were enough to live on and put a bit into retirement, sure.
Would I rather do my own vision? Of course, but unless I get super-lucky, nobody is going to pay me to do that. If I were employed at a reasonable job already, would i quit to do this? Probably. Being able to work from home would be attractive, and I'd see no reason to have to go into the office other than perhaps a weekly meeting, and even that can be done by webcam these days.
I am, of course, also assuming the game in question is a quality game meant to be played by subscribers. A game that pushes advertisements at people and cares more about turnover than player loyalty would be much less appealing, and would have to offer pretty good compensation (well, if I weren't unemployed anyways).
I've done enough IT jobs where I had zero creative control, and little enough input. Assuming this were a real job, that paid a wage that was comparable to other programming jobs, and offered benefits as you'd expect from a regular job, I see no reason not to. I wouldn't expect the same level of wages as an Oracle DBA, but as long as it were enough to live on and put a bit into retirement, sure.
Would I rather do my own vision? Of course, but unless I get super-lucky, nobody is going to pay me to do that. If I were employed at a reasonable job already, would i quit to do this? Probably. Being able to work from home would be attractive, and I'd see no reason to have to go into the office other than perhaps a weekly meeting, and even that can be done by webcam these days.
I am, of course, also assuming the game in question is a quality game meant to be played by subscribers. A game that pushes advertisements at people and cares more about turnover than player loyalty would be much less appealing, and would have to offer pretty good compensation (well, if I weren't unemployed anyways).
09 Dec, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 4th comment:
Brinson said:
Would you quite your current job to do so, even if it paid less?
It would have to be a pretty well-paid job to not make the pay cut a fairly serious issue for a good software developer.
Brinson said:
Would you want to work on a mud in pursuit of someone else's vision?
This isn't really any different from very many programming jobs, so I don't view it as a serious problem. There's more than enough programming work to be done in building a MUD from scratch that leaving creative content to somebody else is quite sensible in terms of project timing. Besides, programmers tend to be much better programmers than writers, so it's arguably better for the game to let professionals do what they're good at in each field.
09 Dec, 2009, Orrin wrote in the 5th comment:
Brinson said:
Would you? Lets say, tomorrow, the Stephenie Meyer chick (is that the name?) says she's starting a twilight mud, or JK Rowling says she's starting an officlal Harry Potter Mud, and millions of fans are dying over the chance to play and pay money to do so…
I doubt either of those authors will be launching MUDs soon, but that's not to stop any enterprising individuals from approaching them first with a proposal to license their IP for a MUD. Ray Feist licensed the Midkemia setting to IRE for example, so it's not unknown.
10 Dec, 2009, shasarak wrote in the 6th comment:
I used to enjoy MUD programming a lot, and doing it for a living is superficially very attractive; but there are inevitably going to be a lot of "well, it depends…" with a question like that. It would depend on salary; it would depend on the degree of creative freedom; it would depend on what the technical platform was (e.g. if I could work in Smalltalk or Ruby that would be a plus; if it had to be in C then I'd hate it); it would depend on what the company culture was like, whether the people were friendly, whether I had to relocate, what the perks were, and so on, and so on. But, if we assume that everything else was on a par with my current job then yes, absolutely.
13 Dec, 2009, Zen_Clark wrote in the 7th comment:
If someone was willing to hire someone as fresh into mud development as me, I'd do it in a hear beat; especially since I'm currently unemployed.
But there is always the chance that if I start to work professionally with a company, that they may have a non-compete requirement. In that case,
I would not work for anyone professionally.
But there is always the chance that if I start to work professionally with a company, that they may have a non-compete requirement. In that case,
I would not work for anyone professionally.
13 Dec, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 8th comment:
Zen_Clark said:
But there is always the chance that if I start to work professionally with a company, that they may have a non-compete requirement. In that case,
I would not work for anyone professionally.
I would not work for anyone professionally.
Non-competes are not eternal (they are usually rather short, actually), and many states place extremely strict limits on what exactly can be covered by a non-compete.
Regardless, almost every serious job will have some form of non-compete agreement, if anything in the form of trade secrets that may not be shared. Saying you won't work under these conditions is almost paramount to saying you won't work in any job involving any form of real decision-making.
13 Dec, 2009, Zen_Clark wrote in the 9th comment:
I was just thinking that if I were coding for a company, they might not want me implementing any similar features that I do for the company.
If everything that I work on is considered to be unofficially patented, then I might as well not work on a hobby mud any longer.
Though, I do have little experience with working with non-compete agreements, so I may be wrong somewhere as to how they do and don't work.
If everything that I work on is considered to be unofficially patented, then I might as well not work on a hobby mud any longer.
Though, I do have little experience with working with non-compete agreements, so I may be wrong somewhere as to how they do and don't work.
13 Dec, 2009, Orrin wrote in the 10th comment:
Zen_Clark said:
I was just thinking that if I were coding for a company, they might not want me implementing any similar features that I do for the company.
Where I've carried out work as part of a commercial contract that I've wanted to reuse in other projects (whether hobby or not) I've agreed this with the employer and just not billed them for it.
13 Dec, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 11th comment:
Zen Clark said:
If everything that I work on is considered to be unofficially patented, then I might as well not work on a hobby mud any longer.
They can't do this. You can't prevent somebody from ever using a linked list again just because they used one when working for you. I think you are somewhat exaggerating the power that non-compete arguments have; by your interpretation, any programmer doing anything non-trivial for a certain length of time would almost never be able to work for any other software company again!
13 Dec, 2009, Zen_Clark wrote in the 12th comment:
O.k. Then I guess I should read into what those can and can not do sometime.
Would you want to work on the MUD as a career? Would you quite your current job to do so, even if it paid less? Would you want to work on a mud in pursuit of someone else's vision?
Just some things I've been thinking about.