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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Don’t they kind of lead the pack though? Every optimization I implement, they did like 10 years ago.
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Don’t they kind of lead the pack though? Every optimization I implement, they did like 10 years ago.
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I use game dev techniques in finance software every day
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maybe it’s just that games are stories by nature, and so game designers must be better storytellers
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Not just strictly legally, but in culture. Taking about a project that is “done” in some meaningful way is very different than taking about things that are ongoing. It’s one thing to talk about a company that has died. Another about the current situation at your current employer.
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i feel like the halide folks consistently blog about their work in the way that game dev folks would but it’s i think it can feel easier to put together a software design retro blog than give a presentation and vice versa depending on your process materials at hand.
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Game designers are almost always trying to push the edge of what their software can do. There’s always demand for better looking games. With SaaS for example, the tech is often unimpressive and largely amounts to dealing with incidental complexity.
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