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Personally I think that individual game designers were important when the whole game could be made by like ten or twenty people. Remember that in the seventies

by aasasd 4y ago

Personally I think that individual game designers were important when the whole game could be made by like ten or twenty people. Remember that in the seventies and early eighties, literally a couple guys could slap together a game and sell it (which pretty much led to the crash of '83, since there was a lot of garbage). This changed a bit in the 90s, but still small teams did a lot until around mid-2000s when everyone flocked to larger publishers and got reshuffled into mostly nameless studios. Plus, games up to mid-2000s often explored new territory and invented new genres—in the 90s, many gamers knew who made the three outstanding games of the year. Whereas these days, new stuff appears maybe two or three times in a decade, and then gets flogged to death by dozens of copycats. Perhaps today it's just meaningless to name one or two people who ‘design’ the game, when most of it is concepts borrowed from the common pool of the industry, and the content proper is made by twenty designers. Indie games are where the individuals are now. Jonathan Blow, Zachtronics, Zach and Tarn Adams, Toby Fox, Emily Short, Jason Rohrer—these kind of guys. People still not just buy, but fund games by Ron Gilbert because it's his games.

hnfong 4y ago
But these days movies are made by teams of hundreds of people too.
- aasasd 4y ago
  A film director has control over the source material and the result (hopefully has, at least). Whereas I'm not sure that there's a single person with such responsibility in game dev: afaik someone like a director or a PM overlooks the development, but it's more just a management job like with film directors in the past or on TV. Game designers decide the mechanics, but don't control the team. I'm not really versed in the modern process of gamedev, but I haven't heard of such a central position—maybe other than Kojima and a couple other guys. Likewise, I think the role of a director is diluted in animation: it's hard to imagine one guy pestering main animators until they come up with a desired look—surely it's much more of a team effort. In the end, I think a cinema director chooses a room and a camera, and then shouts at the actors until they do as he envisions—it's glorified theater, after all. Whereas in games and animation much more of the result depends on the artists and programmers at each point: they have to prepare every single bit in advance for the player to experience, and the PM can't just tell the characters to act less stiffly in the next take. IMO about the same thing happens in software development in general: UX and UI designers are in large part responsible for how the product should feel to the user, but they almost never control the process—with just a couple exceptions that I know. And we usually don't hear about these designers, unless it's a statement of fashion.

by aasasd 4y ago

hnfong 4y ago

But these days movies are made by teams of hundreds of people too.

aasasd 4y ago
A film director has control over the source material and the result (hopefully has, at least). Whereas I'm not sure that there's a single person with such responsibility in game dev: afaik someone like a director or a PM overlooks the development, but it's more just a management job like with film directors in the past or on TV. Game designers decide the mechanics, but don't control the team. I'm not really versed in the modern process of gamedev, but I haven't heard of such a central position—maybe other than Kojima and a couple other guys. Likewise, I think the role of a director is diluted in animation: it's hard to imagine one guy pestering main animators until they come up with a desired look—surely it's much more of a team effort. In the end, I think a cinema director chooses a room and a camera, and then shouts at the actors until they do as he envisions—it's glorified theater, after all. Whereas in games and animation much more of the result depends on the artists and programmers at each point: they have to prepare every single bit in advance for the player to experience, and the PM can't just tell the characters to act less stiffly in the next take. IMO about the same thing happens in software development in general: UX and UI designers are in large part responsible for how the product should feel to the user, but they almost never control the process—with just a couple exceptions that I know. And we usually don't hear about these designers, unless it's a statement of fashion.