The doll story reminded me that there's tech out there that is expensive and hard in a way that makes engineers happy, but there could be some other much simpler tech that makes the end users happier.
Example: AT&T kept advertising about how they're working on video phones (hard tech: latency, bandwidth, cameras, screens) but all I really wanted was SMS (easy tech by comparison)
Example: Twitter is using some fancy statistical or machine learning model (hard tech) to guess that I'm interested in peru, deadpool, university of alabama. And I have to guess that it thinks that I'm interested in peru because I was reading about the guano war (I'm not particularly interested in peru in general), and that I'm intersted in deadpool because a friend of mine wanted to watch a deadpool video on my tablet (I'm not interested in deadpool myself), and that I'm interested in the university of alabama because I was reading about alabama's role in the Apollo missions (but I'm not particularly interested in the university of alabama). They're doing something hard that frustrates me, when they could've done something easy like ask me, and I would've been happier with the results.
I like that in games, we can do something simple and let the player's imagination/apophenia invent the rest. I enjoyed a recent paper[1] about Caves of Qud generating a plausible history to fit the events the player has seen so far.
The doll story reminded me that there's tech out there that is expensive and hard in a way that makes engineers happy, but there could be some other much simpler tech that makes the end users happier.
Example: AT&T kept advertising about how they're working on video phones (hard tech: latency, bandwidth, cameras, screens) but all I really wanted was SMS (easy tech by comparison)
Example: Twitter is using some fancy statistical or machine learning model (hard tech) to guess that I'm interested in peru, deadpool, university of alabama. And I have to guess that it thinks that I'm interested in peru because I was reading about the guano war (I'm not particularly interested in peru in general), and that I'm intersted in deadpool because a friend of mine wanted to watch a deadpool video on my tablet (I'm not interested in deadpool myself), and that I'm interested in the university of alabama because I was reading about alabama's role in the Apollo missions (but I'm not particularly interested in the university of alabama). They're doing something hard that frustrates me, when they could've done something easy like ask me, and I would've been happier with the results.
I like that in games, we can do something simple and let the player's imagination/apophenia invent the rest. I enjoyed a recent paper[1] about Caves of Qud generating a plausible history to fit the events the player has seen so far.
[1] https://www.freeholdgames.com/papers/Generation_of_Mythic_Bi...