A fun one from games are process gates between different ‘stages’ of development. Nominally it makes a lot of sense to make a vertical slice of a game, it mean

A fun one from games are process gates between different ‘stages’ of development. Nominally it makes a lot of sense to make a vertical slice of a game, it means you’ve demonstrated all the core mechanics to a polished state in a production quality part of the game. All you need to do now is go wide in content production and continue to polish the game mechanics. In reality no one is interested in whether the game is actually ready just that it’s now the arbitrary time to review. Teams end up building the vertical slice to order so they pass the gate review. It’s full of half cobbled together systems and built with half-finished art pipelines. It passes and drags all this crap into production or it fails and you have a demoralised team. Either way you’ve just wasted months of work to fulfil some arbitrary criteria. It goes hand in hand with the seagull school of management. Fly in, shit all over everything and fly away. It’s more macro than the articles examples so less a death from a thousand cuts but it’s easily one of the most detrimental things I’ve seen cargo culted across game teams.