Game designers have a strong culture of producing serious, insightful talks about their work.
By contrast, such talks seem much rarer from contemporary software designers. Why might that be? Or am I wrong—am I missing some incredible trove?
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The most persuasive theory for me right now is that software designers are much more likely to be constrained by NDAs in an ongoing fashion, whereas game designers are more or less free to talk once the game is shipped. Is that enough to explain the gap?
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(One reason for that difference, by the way, might be the point that and I make in TTFT—that games avoid the public goods knowledge for design innovation by making most of their money on initial sales: numinous.productions/ttft/#why-not- )
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As Ken points out, I think part of the story is "game designers / devs are often much much more talented than their software designer / dev counterparts". But I know tons of incredible software designers—it's not quite enough.
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Replying to @andy_matuschak
Don’t they kind of lead the pack though? Every optimization I implement, they did like 10 years ago.
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Product designers don't have the benefit/problem of working on 4-5 years-long projects.
I think it's easier to extract learnings and reflect on long-term investments than in rushed products that are constantly changing.
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I was in games for 23 years, released 44 games, and never once had 4-5 years to make anything. Almost never even had half that, in fact. Meanwhile there are people that have spent their entire career working on word or excel.
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First thought is that since the end result is more creative, onlookers attribute the success of the product more to the individual designer, so there’s more motivation to present on it.
Software designers are often following well-laid principles.
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Hm hm I’m wondering whether you have examples of the kind of thing from each that you’re seeing, like what you’re finding serious and insightful
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Absolutely! You've seen many of these, but some favorites from my list:
- youtube.com/watch?v=UGCkVH
- youtube.com/watch?v=UGCkVH
- youtube.com/watch?v=RmGb-j
- youtube.com/watch?v=ZW8gWg
- youtube.com/watch?v=AJ-auW
- youtube.com/watch?v=d0m0jI
-
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I think it's because game design is closer to creating art, which has always been an area that's discussed and debated. This isn't the case with other things, like regular software design.
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Yeah it’s spiritually closer to filmmaking or animation than software dev. Down to the creative process and the way teams are set up.
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