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.
Just a thought: maybe because game developers work in a much more “do anything to make it work” type of environment, and often times new games are written from scratch, not much legacy to hold back? Could be wrong
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You're not wrong.
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Yeah, that's definitely not it. Later replies feel more accurate: game devs are solving discrete problems for a world of their own design, and can share solutions that may be directly helpful, or at least inspiring, to other world-making devs.
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Any real-world product developer* worth their salt could never tell a simple story of how they worked through any of these types of issues, because they don't control the real world.
*by which I mean, anyone in the product development cycle
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I'm reading and watching stuff about 80s and early 90s game development, and it's stuff like this:
"Spluvix Games was founded by high school buddies John and George in George's parents' basement.
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Same as “Masters of Doom”, just a few proper nouns changed…
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I know everyone feels like they are doing a lot of work, etc, but frankly there just is *not very much* design in general software, just speaking by sheer quality/density. The standard of how much design you have to do to make the thing, thus the definition of the designer’s job,
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is totally different between fields. There is just way more to talk about in games because a lot more actual work was done.
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