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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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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Yes! We did look at a bunch of these together! Okay I’m actually really curious about this so I’m going to poke around.
I know that the initial “blue skyness” of games and the containment of the project as a unit post-ship is one big difference…
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A lot of software product design starts mired in legacy, and shipping is immediately chased by frantic fixes and optimizations. Plus the entire incentive structure (as you alluded to) is dramatically different: a studio wants a good rep / story to build up what they’ll build…
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…next, vs most mid-size software companies build out a single project and keep that single thing going
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Can you imagine what our software and operating systems could look like if we shipped them like games?
My first impulse is to imagine we’d be so much further along by now
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I think I need to understand more here: how would we be further along if we shipped other software like games? Eg, by rewriting everything for each new app, and just getting rid of backwards compatibility entirely?
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I’m not sure I actually agree with my first impulse! It was based on the (probably oversimplified and naive) idea that we could remake / rethink more rapidly if we threw things out more often and were open to changing things up completely
More thoughts over here
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Replying to @mayli and @andy_matuschak
But maybe we wouldn’t, because the expectations are so different for non-game software and the kinds of complexities are also totally different (in particular, the treatment of user data and user content, sometimes over decades)
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