ION 08: What can game developers learn from web 2.0?
God, read every word of this article twice. This is really good stuff. Nom nom nom. People are starting to notice that you don’t need a lot of money to make a great idea work. You also don’t need a perfect product as long as you’re evolving and flexible.
Martin suggests a new mantra: “Embrace the Chaos” — this requires a lot of letting go. His advice is to have faith that chaos is good for you, despite the lack of obvious guarantees. Whereas traditional programming is built on the principles of ACID (atomic, consistent, independent, durable), the web is built on the principles of BASE as introduced by Google (basically available, soft-state, eventually consistent). ACIDity creates trust but kills innovation, whereas BASE promotes innovation and still allows a certain level of trust. The trust comes in the “eventually consistent” part of the equation in which all your data coalesces — and provided you can get your vendors to agree to this model you have a non-obvious guarantee of trust and you can successfully sacrifice the “good” point of the triangle.