Just because I noticed while writing the other post.

Dave Rickey countered my argument to put the “polish” within a bigger set called “accessibility” with:

Polish vs. acessibility: You say “Tah-may-toe”, I say “vine grown fruit frequently mistaken for a vegetable”. Polish/Accessibility is the enemy of innovation and novelty, new features and gameplay are not accessible and haven’t yet been polished.

This discussion is about a detail I consider extremely important.

Polish and accessibility aren’t interchangeable. The difference is that the meaning of “polish” is: “make something better”. The focus is “better”. It’s unspecified. From the point of view of our considerations it’s just not useful (if not to state the obvious, like that these games need more reiterations and more work).

The accessibility, instead, can be specified. While you cannot really say when something is polished or not, you can say when a system or a feature is accessible and usable or not (see the beginning of this post for example) and even the extent of it. Which makes this definition simply more useful. We can define the goal and isolate what still need works.

Since I also noted the low hardware requirements as “accessibility” one could argue that this directly hinders the innovation, at least from the technological point of view. This is why Brad McQuaid chose to push the envelope and you can see the wonderful results here. The same applies to the horrid EQ2.

Despite WoW is supposed to have an older technology, it still looks better and delivers more on “what matters”. The technology isn’t an end in itself. It is just a “mean” to deliver something else. The technology is in the middle, not at the ends. We use it for.

These same arguments can be used also when we discuss the need (or the lack of it) of advanced AI in these games. A pet peeve of Dave Rickey that I often criticized and that I’ll get back tomorrow after I parse some intelligent comments on Babylona’s blog (and Dave is already there, hehe).

Note to myself: Remember to also counter the need for “abstraction” that Babylona expressed here. What we need is EXACTLY the opposite. We need identity.