I was wrong about game development
24 points by mijndert
24 points by mijndert
As a game developer myself, I feel you.
Engineers hate working without defined requirements, and there's nothing quite so undefined as art, and everything about games is art... from the literal art, to the way you're meant to feel when playing..
So I empathise.
One thing that might be valuable to bring up, however controversial, is to look at what existed before and how it impacted people.
Back in ye olden days of games, arcade cabinets used to reset scores on occasion - we have technology to do one better: major version leaderboards.
Immortalised in history as being "position 70" on the first leaderboard. This is largely how "ranked games" work with regards to seasons (Apex Legends is a prime example).
Food for thought, but of course it makes things less simple and somewhat more "eternal"- which is violates that feeling that things are attainable, as you're fusing out the mechanism to ever dethrone someone on a prior leaderboard.
FWIW Simulation software also works like this, if you do flight sim training; your session data will be recorded against a version of that software and it will be recorded as such.
everything about games is art
There's a line there and there definitely are "art games" but generally games are not art. The common term is "game design" and the extrinsic goals are usually quite clear.
The design is to craft a feeling.
It's called design for a reason, and not 'technical writing' or 'specification manufacturing' or whatever alternative exists within engineering/architecture.
Design vs. art is a timeless debate which probably we shouldn't have here.
I would say for instance that open source is "art".
This is what I always loved about the original StarCraft back in the day: Blizzard kept tweaking imbalances for years after the game was released, to keep online play interesting and challenging. I was never any good at it (and I only had dial-up, so rarely even played online), so I have no idea how they dealt with leaderboards and such.