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?
Conversation
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
1
11
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
-
3
4
76
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…
2
9
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…
2
14
related / better hypotheses from :
software designers actually hold a lot less power over the systems they design than game designers do. just by the nature of the medium and the desired output
1
1
11
game designers are essentially the business drivers of the games industry. the auteur culture thing. they’re the big names who talk big to get money to keep making games. so they’re incentivized to talk! in tech, that role is usually business folk, not the software designers
2
13
This is persuasive too! And it also explains why software designer conference talks are relatively much more often about issues of workplace culture, rather than the work itself.