My game-inventing club has an ethnographer from the local University attending our meetings. We welcome here; teach her our gentle ways and show her how to achieve the good life: by inventing fun things!
Anthropology is ridiculously useful for sales and marketing.<p>I owe a guy named Michiel van Meeteren a beer or three for his 'Indie Fever' (<a href="http://www.madebysofa.com/indiefever/" rel="nofollow">http://www.madebysofa.com/indiefever/</a>), a ethnography of indie Mac developers - which came out right when I was crafting a pitch to indie Mac developers at the start of the iOS software boom back in 2008.<p>That book is terribly dated now - the success of iOS completely mutated the culture. But it was accurate at that time, and helped me avoid some terrible errors - errors I totally would have made, had I just followed my instincts.<p>If you're selling or planning to sell anything to the hacker community she researched, you should jump on her book, stat.
Am I the only one who's slightly offended by being portrayed like a rogue tribe of bushmen that researchers "go and live with" to study?<p>Hackers, aka. software developers, are just people with a specific job.
Regarding her quest for good hacker films, try Jason Scott's BBS documentary or to a lesser extent his text adventure documentary.<p>If she's looking for a big name formulaic Hollywood blockbuster, don't bother, because there's no original comic book for them to make a sequel or remake of. Maybe in a generation (or two) Hollywood could turn xkcd or penny arcade into a movie remake?
Works of this ilk has been done in the past. Look at the original "Hackers" book or "Soul of a New Machine". And the jokes that she finds very funny are mostly bad puns to the folks that have been in the "culture" for decades.
Here is a tldr of the interview: <a href="http://tldr.io/tldrs/50b61713bb2203997700013f" rel="nofollow">http://tldr.io/tldrs/50b61713bb2203997700013f</a>
Biella is, among other things, a really sweet person, and I look forward to reading her book. I was confused when I saw the title of this submission because it sounds like something that just happened, not something that happened several years ago.
For three years jedi knights tolerated questions about the Force and everything from a young she-padawan. Until they realised she can't spell "42".<p>Dudes, seriously, does anyone of you want to be treated like monkey tribe? Even if it is anonymous?