[MUD-Dev] R&D

[amanda at alfar.com]

Brian Bilek <brian at darkalley.net> wrote:

> publishing houses that rely on outside developers, marketers and
> business executives lack a true understanding of the product
> concepts, and the customers they are selling to.  [...]

> But at the 'game development' level, the company seems to be
> extremely closed to outside influence.  Due to the way most game
> companies seem to hire, business experience means little here.

There are barriers to entry into any industry, particularly a small
niche like gaming (note that I'm talking about the developer
community, not the end user market here :-)).  In a small niche, it
takes a lot of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and paying
your dues in order to demonstrate your proficiency with the
practical craft of working in that niche as well as the theory.

I don't think this is anything special about gaming.  I started
doing networking development in the mid 80s and multiplatform
development in the early 90s, and recognize a lot of the same
effects: a small pool of truly field-proven developers, a lot of
work trying to figure out which successes were intentional and which
were dumb luck, and a lot of impatience with business types who
"just don't get it."  15 years later, the landscape is completely
different.  I think the same will be true of gaming.

Right now, there's more work than skill, and a lot of people who
have interest at the level of "I want to make games."  There's a
large gap between wanting to make games and understanding how to be
part of an effective product team; how to manage large-scale
development and asset management; and technical skills like network
architecture, performance issues, high availability, testing, and so
on.  A modern game is not a simple programming task, and so there's
a reason that it's hard as an outsider to get anything but an entry
level position, despite experience in other niches.

Luckily, game development is starting to mature.  Taking a single
example, Game Developer magazine is no longer about tweaky little
details such as how to do forward differencing in x86
assembler--it's about asset management, project workflow, and post
hoc analysis of what things went right and wrong with game releases.
It's more and more trying to get industry lore down on paper (or
electrons) instead of locked into peoples' heads.  This is a very,
very good thing.  Now, I'm sure there are people who think GD mag
has gone downhill as a result--there's certainly still a place for
math and coding tweaks.  But that's no longer the central challenge
of game development.


Amanda Walker
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