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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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 didn’t know about that!—good read?
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