Insight
Narula: PC Platforms Like Steam Present Steep UX Barriers For Mobile Gamers
“A lot of people had previously played mobile games. And one of the requirements was to download the game from Steam in order to interact with it. These weren't like hardcore gamers. Just the click process in Steam was utterly alien to them. I mean, these are p…”
Opinion
Narula: Fundamental approaches to distributed systems haven't changed since the 1980s
“Most of the ideas that are being used now, like actor paradigms, for example, which some people may be familiar with. I mean, these are from the eighties, right? Nothing's really changed in how we attack distributed systems.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Narula: Dominant simulation platforms must rewrite low-level infrastructure software
“I mean, I think ultimately the companies and solutions are going to start dominating the space. They're going to have to redo a lot of stuff at quite low layers in order to make it effective. So there may be a need to throw out some of the work that's gone bef…”
Opinion
Narula: High-Budget AAA Games Suffer From Sameness And Lack Risk
“The one thing as a gamer, as a big fan of some of your games as well, that I've really you know, hated in the last few years has been the sameness and lack of risk around so many of the higher budget productions that are out there.”
Opinion
Narula: High-End Graphics Are Not The Primary Driver Of Game Engagement
“I think that graphics are not the be all and end all of gaming experience. I think there's more fundamental components to engagement I wish people would explore more, which aren't as flashy as just increasing pixel density.”
Opinion
Narula: System-Based Game Design Can Be Lazy
“Completely, and there's another worst problem, which is that I think some systems case, games-based design can be very lazy, right?”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Narula: Distributed computing's next phase will target hard-to-split problems
“I think the next few years are going to be about attacking problems which are naturally harder to split, harder to scale. And how we go about that, I mean, a whole other layer of reliability is going to be required as well for computations that are more challe…”
Disclosure
Narula: Elite UK university academics use costly supercomputers unaware of distributed alternatives
“And we see a lot of academics that we speak to in kind of Cambridge, Oxford, using supercomputer methods right now, unaware that actually a distributed systems approach might be more cost effective or even easier to think about from that perspective.”
Insight
Narula: Historical data cannot answer what-if questions about unprecedented events
“You can answer questions, right? Answer those what if questions? What happens if, you know, a disease is released in this crowd? What happens if we shut down this tube station? Questions which governments and companies want to answer, but which, you know, you …”
Insight
Narula: Emergent complexity in simulations challenges preconceived domain assumptions
“Analytical methods, they come with a certain degree of certainty and trust, right? Like, I can exactly explain to you why, how and why this works, but emerging complexity is unpredictable. It's scary. The results may not be what you What you expect, and it has…”
Insight
Narula: Simulations should function as operating platforms, not static offline models
“At Improbable, we don't really believe that a simulation should be this, like, standalone box where knowledge comes out of. We see it as an operating platform, somewhere that you can actually make decisions and build applications that consume that simulation.”
Insight
Narula: Adding spatial parameters to Prisoner's Dilemma simulations radically alters outcomes
“When you just run prisoner's dilemma style games between participants, okay, you get one outcome. But when you start to introduce geographic components to those simulations, suddenly it all changes again.”
Disclosure
Narula: Improbable partners with Oxford to model the UK housing economy
“So, I mean, for example, we're dealing with a group called the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford, and these are some amazing scientists, and they want to model the UK housing economy.”
Disclosure
Narula: Improbable models power grid failures to reveal catastrophic risk accumulation
“For example, when we look at cascading failures in power grids, which is an area that, you know, we've explored it with improbable, how those failures arise can often be the accumulation of many, many disparate, like, seemingly irrelevant events and slight vul…”
