9 ms·

Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

178 points by stevefan1999 3y ago

noobermin 3y ago
I thought this was the point of project managers, they're supposed to harmonise various types of specialist when no one generalist can do everything.
- lylejantzi3rd 3y ago
  That never works in practice. Specialists want to do the thing they specialize in. What happens when you have a bug that bridges across multiple areas of the code? Nobody wants to deal with those bugs because it would mean leaving their area of expertise. This also applies to anything that applies to the game as a whole, like optimization or look and feel.
- resonious 3y ago
  I think this is true, but even still, having pure communication-overhead roles will probably never outperform a team of generalist ICs. (edit: just my opinion - I have no data for this)
- surfpel 3y ago
  That’s the point of integration. They’re generalists who are like technical project managers and bridge the gap between teams.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- icegreentea2 3y ago
  A good PM will go a long way to mitigating the problems with lack of generalists, but they can only go so far. The heart of the problem is that at some point, you need to make decisions and solve problems where disciplines interact. In the end, you cannot really make an informed decision, or reliability solve problems in these situations without some party actually being able to grasp the cross-disciplinary picture. In the absence of actual generalists, you usually end up with ad-hoc education - crash courses where each discipline tries to educate the other (and the PM), so that they can try to get something hammered out. And this can actually be quite successful - this happens all the time, and works out very often. In fact, this is probably where many generalists (or dual-hatters) organically arise - you get a crash course in some other area while trying to figure out a problem, and then the next time you get tapped because you already have some knowledge, and you find it kinda interesting and the next thing you know, you're a generalist of sorts. I think it's quite true that in large projects you can't possibly have a generalist who actually knows -everything-. But it's also quite possible to have a good bench of dual-hatters (or dunno... 3-4 hatters), who can go a long way to relieving issues.
- grensley 3y ago
  In my experience they are very limited by their lack of familiarity with the code. They might be a generalist at everything else, but that's a pretty hard ceiling.
  - t-writescode 3y ago
    It's the developer's job to help relay the difficulties they're experiencing to the PMs so they can all work together to reduce tech debt or weirdness. And back when I worked at Microsoft, the PMs were call-pattern experts, too, or at least the great ones were.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      We sadly don't have a lot of "great PMs" in games. Pay's not worth it to begin with as a programmer, so they wouldn't make much more (or even less) if they worked as a producer or even PM.
croes 3y ago
Is it even possible nowadays to be a generalist? In science something similar happened. There was a time where some people knew pretty much in every science field, chemistry, physics, biology etc. but the amount of knowledge grew and it become impossible to know enough in every field. Maybe game development isn't any different. You either become an expert in on field or your knowledge is to superficial to actually help.
- strken 3y ago
  Not sure about game development, but it sounds like a specialist programmer could become a dabbling audio engineer or narrative writer if given the opportunity, or vice versa. Might be a management problem: on a team of ten, you can grab the writer (singular) for coffee and spend a couple of days designing and writing dialogue for a side quest yourself, but on a team of hundreds it must be a lot harder. And then, once you've spend that time using the tools, you can refactor the SpeechOptionNode to incorporate skill checks without attaching a script, or whatever other obscure tooling problems the writers are dealing with.
- softsound 3y ago
  What do you think most indies are? I'd consider most indies much more generalist. You can't ever know a whole field but you can know pieces of it and once you learn one system it can be easier to know another. I think for example programmers often make very good designers as they will think though problems, handle attention to detail, and work to often find multiple solutions if need be... Wait that sounds like every field doesn't it ;) code, art, design, sound etc. The main issue is mindset, a programmer might cut short a design to save himself time, an artist might simplify the gameplay to not put in as much effort, and a musician or writer might not focus as much on the visuals because they get caught up in how it should it sound/read etc. But they certainly can take on other roles. If you have any experience with start-ups and indies or freelancing you might find yourself take over roles you didn't expect originally. On smaller teams this goes a lot further.
  - physicsguy 3y ago
    It’s rare that Indie games are the same technical sophistication though. Nothing wrong with them at all but the scale is just totally different, it’s like running a small bakery shop vs an industrial factory churning out bread for supermarkets
Pannoniae 3y ago
This also explains the declining gameplay and immersion of many (most?) games. The art and the gameplay are simply not synced to each other, so they feel separate and disjoint. For example, the environment having similarly looking but differently behaving objects like rocks. Or how instead of designing emergent systems, most games just slap modifiers on everything and "balance" that way. +20% bow reload speed and +25% speed, anyone?
- cynicalkane 3y ago
  I think this harmoniousness operates in more subtle ways, too. I'm playing through the new Zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom, and it's a lot of fun, but there's something that doesn't quite click... like the UI is a behavorial engagement layer over the game, and not part of the game itself. Like you can never be completely in the world because something outside is holding your hand all the way. The 16- through 64- bit Zeldas, for their clunkiness, were compellingly immersive. I don't think it's just nostalgia; I've played indie games where the UI is part of a whole that sucks you in. This is true even if the UI has a modern feel, like Hollow Knight, which felt overpolished in its presentation and interface, to me at least, in a way that was off-kilter -- yet something about it sucks you in instead of pulling you out, being part of the world's presentation and in an aesthetically transitive sense part of the world itself. There's something about these modern AAA games where you feel like you're not playing a game but rather a Skinner box containing a game. It's just not the same. I can't exactly put my finger on it.
  - softsound 3y ago
    The UI for Tears of the Kingdom has been quite annoying to me in this regard but so many aspects of that game were just troublesome. It's still fun, but the story and characters make no sense, the UI is modern and lifeless. They went into the weeds of the gameplay, you can see that's where they put their energy. I've been disappointed in a lot of the directions... It's just bad furries left and right. This game would sell with most anything they put in it, but it feels lackluster and unmemorable in many areas. I'm probably a minority in thinking the voice actors are trying too hard too.. I do love the idea of being able to go up and down though it feels a little awkward to me as I normally have to go way up to go down into the underground due to a lot of level design. I kinda wish they put some more cliffs nearby to save me the time. I like the underground a lot though and find that part the most fun.
irrational 3y ago
I spent 23+ years doing front end programming, server side programming, database design, sql writing, shell script writing, etc. Recently I was moved into an integration position that primarily used Apache nifi (a gui application) to tie systems together. It is very specialized and quite boring. No code writing required. It feels insane to move a generalist like myself into a specialist position, but they were sunsetting what I had been working on and this was what was open at my same level (at least on paper).
BeetleB 3y ago
I just got done reading Sid Meier's Memoir! He also touts the importance of being a generalist. You can have programming as your primary expertise, but you should have a bare minimal competence in both audio and graphics. On a number of occasions, he'd have a vision for one aspect of his game that the whole team was against, and the way he would convince them would be to make a working prototype of that feature. The audio/graphics would be poor, but they needed to be good enough to demonstrate it and have his team members play. He could get underlings to execute on his vision, but he felt that if they didn't believe in it, they likely would put a lot less effort than he would.
- mcv 3y ago
  That is an excellent approach. It's always better to have people believe and care instead of simply obey.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  While this was nice, I also especially like the sections where he realizes he was wrong to keep insisting on doing stuff himself, like when they finally get a dedicated artist and sound designer.
  - BeetleB 3y ago
    The two are unrelated. In the latter, he was referring to a dedicated artist/sound designer for the final product. In my comment, he is referring to building a quick prototype to show to the team. Once he's done that, the dedicated folks will make the actual final/production version based on his prototype.
    - Aeolun 3y ago
      Oh, yes. I didn’t mean to imply they were mutually exclusive. Just that the one spoke to me more than the other :)
nitwit005 3y ago
The generalist's resume looks worse. They have 2 years experience with (insert role here), compared to the other guy who has 8, because they've worked in multiple roles. Some industries have realized they want some people who have multiple skills, such as the "full stack engineer" roles, but it seems rather more common to prefer someone who precisely fits into the specialist role they defined.
- Justsignedup 3y ago
  Hell, I experience this a lot. My experience is doing a lot of things, and being a force multiplier. However you go to a larger company, and suddenly they're looking for very specific experience doing specific scaling that I never got to do in all my roles, boom, it is terrible for my resume. And many young people see this and just decide that let's just focus on that, and make a great resume, rather than try to be useful. I could have come into a job and say "okay, I know back end, let me focus on that" but instead I spent a day installing a shitty data pipeline that more or less took us through the next 4 years of data analytical needs for almost no cost. Etc. It is just how it is. I even read a post on HN about a decade ago about how a guy was hire #1, was instrumental in the growth of a company, and when it was purchased was pushed out because they didn't need a generalist anymore, they needed a specialist. And so he decided to drop the generalist role and focus entirely on one technical aspect to the benefit of his career. So while I agree with Tim, I also have to say, as someone in the thick of it, there's no good way out. Unless you want to keep working for Seed / Series A startups, fingers crossed they sell or you won't make that okay payoff.
  - taherchhabra 3y ago
    I am in the same boat as you. For generalist,after a point, i feel the only way up is to start something of your own.
    - trinsic2 3y ago
      This is why I dont work for anyone but my customers. There is no way I would deal with the kind of dissonance we are living through today. I do all my design work, my coding, my deduction for people that hire me directly for individual projects. I don't make as much money as I would working for a company, but you can't put a price on piece of mind.
brandensilva 3y ago
I tell you what, the Diablo 4 game is a perfect example of disjointedness that comes from pure specialists with little to no one who is a generalist that can bridge departments together in a way that makes for a better game and experience. And while they have made strides to implementing much of the community feedback for Season 2 many months later after much of the gamers have left, it isn't the same thing as having a leader who already gets the cross disciplinary shortcomings that resulted in such a poor end game that was out of touch and underwhelming. Something only a generalist leader with some authority, gaming experience, gaming systems and design, and passion could pull off.
- ycombinete 3y ago
  I feel like Chris Wilson's talk Designing Path of Exile to Be Played Forever is a great example of "a generalist leader with some authority, gaming experience, gaming systems and design, and passion": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmuy9fyNUjY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmuy9fyNUjY
  - brandensilva 3y ago
    Oh totally and this is exactly what I mean. I've listened to Chris and am a huge fan of his. The depth, experience, and love he puts into POE clearly demonstrates a generalist who gets it. Chris is a linchpin. This is exactly the kind of people Blizzard lacks. They used to exist but they pushed out many of the generalists for the factory model of specialists and haven't really recovered since. That doesn't mean they don't make decent games given the talent of the specialists in art and development, but the game design itself really requires a broader individual or group to bring it together. Thanks for share.
- seventhtiger 3y ago
  I think Diablo 4 is really well made but I keep getting surprised by some goofs in what I would consider the most important parts of the game. Like even when I make a small scale RPG, my damage formulas and scaling and so on are my bread and butter. I obsess over them. I would accept being wrong about the resulting experience and having to adjust, but to me it's really unacceptable to have oversights and mistakes there. So something like how broken resistance was, or different types of scaling implemented wrong. That's not disagreeing about the outcome. That's clear oversight in what I consider the heart of the game. Or for example how the mount's controls with mouse were just remapped from joystick and you have to put your mouse at the edge of the screen to go fast. I don't understand how to reconcile such a big and well made game with many baffling oversights in the game's core systems. Feels competent and amateurish at the same time.
oooyay 3y ago
This has probably hit the enterprise software world as well, at least from what I can tell. A lot of people are solidly in frontend or backend; backend tends to be even narrowed into asynchronous systems, identity, etc. Finding people who have some high to medium level knowledge in most of the landscape, a more low level background in general computing, and can dig into specific subjects when they need to is exceedingly rare. If I had to guess, generalists look very unfocused to managers and recruiters and are often not considered for TL positions.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago
  Well then maybe companies should allow for more horizontal mobility for the employees that they already have instead of always hiring from the outside. Or perhaps recruiters should be trained to stop filtering out candidates from another tech stack but with many years of experience because the same patterns apply anyway, only the language is different.
- kuchenbecker 3y ago
  To some degree Conway's Law [1] in that sufficiently large organizations each team will fulfill a more and more niche specialty. Basically teams get bigger and split into multiple charters, often subcategories of the original team. I've worked in medium to large companies (3k-200k employees) and the smaller companies what is the responsibility of a team would be an entire org in the larger ones. Even getting all the experts in a room is hard when it's the TL and Manager from half a dozen teams. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law
- Aeolun 3y ago
  What I think is surprising is that even as a generalist you are often more suited to diagnose specialized problems, because you can look further than your own area of expertise.
proc0 3y ago
I think this is related to how games are increasingly live services, therefore approximating the product development of web and as a result adopting some of the practices of that industry. Even for offline single player games, 'early access' and frequent patches are the norm, and so it's not hard to see how the organization starts solving for these problems at the cost of creative cohesion. Games require a unique combination and overlap of creative art and software engineering, something that is hard to measure and quantify... and that is why I think it becomes evident when the leadership of a company is blind to the creative element, maximizing short term business value instead of long term creative value (which arguably has more business value, but it requires passion and love for the craft).
0dayz 3y ago
AFAIK isn't this more because gamedev and general dev has gone separate ways? Gamedev has become so highly specialized due to the lackluster quality games used to have? (There are plenty of ps1 to ps2 games that handles like garbage despite them being good games). That has I think resulted in more "quality" of AAA games but everything is at best a very predictable bland grey goop.
deafpolygon 3y ago
This is true in other industries, not just gaming.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bitwize 3y ago
I don't work in games. I once saw a glimpse of my boss's notes on me on a screenshare during one of our 1on1s over Teams. The first two bullet points he has about me are something like: * Generalist, has worked in many different areas on different types of software * Thinks that's a bad thing And I do think that's a bad thing, from a career-marketability standpoint anyway. Back in the 80s or 90s, you could get away with being a "guy who knows computers" and they would pretty much stick you anywhere they needed someone who knows computers. And you had to sort of muddle through, figure out what your colleagues needed to do and how to apply the technologies you had on hand to make it easier. Starting in about the 2000s, the enterprise world especially started demanding specialists. They had a J2EE application that needed maintenance and if you didn't know your J2EE backwards and forwards, I'm sorry, there's just no place for you, BOLIYFE[0]. I had spent four years in a robotics company, and then some time at a server appliance company, and the hot thing when I found myself in need of work after those stints was "cloud". If you weren't up on cloud, the industry just couldn't use you. Résumé driven development became a must if you wanted to make a living in the industry. And now those chickens have come home to roost in the gaming industry. Because game development isn't six guys in a strip-mall office messing around, figuring out a way to create something that thrills them at least as much as Mario did. Not anymore. I'll come out and say it: in terms of complexity, budget, and team size, games are enterprise software. Each game is an enormous project, often a distributed system, involving the contributions of hundreds. Games have passed the complexity threshold beyond which no one person can hold even a decent approximation of bigger than a tiny sliver of the whole system in their heads. The dev team is likely to be divided into smaller squads, each of which specialize in a narrow area of the game -- because it has to be. Because each of those areas, alone, is going to be more complex than can be handled by a single person, let alone a small team. And in order to not lose productivity onboarding new people, those people have to have demonstrated expertise in the narrow subset of the whole game whose team they aspire to join, typically by being credited on at least one AAA game title in that area. And generalists, unless they are literally John Carmack or at his level, don't have the deep knowledge it takes to be useful on, say, a AAA game's sound team, or level design team, or gameplay mechanics team, or scenario team. And so we have today the situation where a Hackernews tells a promising kid, put down that homebrew retro console you built out of a Raspberry Pi and learn Unity and Unreal, because that's where you can make a real contribution to the field[1]. And he's right. The industry has changed how it works since the 90s, so in order to stay relevant in the industry you have to change too. Change with the times, or get left behind. Adapt, or die. It was always ever thus. [0] "Best Of Luck In Your Future Endeavors" [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33452920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33452920
meheleventyone 3y ago
I’ve worked in games for twenty years and can safely say there are way more generalists today than there have ever been. Better tools and more awareness simply mean there are way more people making games. Even within large game teams you’ll also find loads of generalists. The issue has never been a lack but that the industry itself crushes you into a box and insists you don’t exist. I’ve sat in meetings where generalists are described as unicorns. There is usually zero organisational impetus to utilise people’s abilities outside of their job spec. There aren’t a lack of generalists, organisations are just blind to their existence and have no understanding of how to use them. As a consequence I’ve always looked for opportunities that let me be a generalist, working on prototyping teams, startups that need you to muck in and now leading a team of generalists making games. Quite a few of my team came from other industry jobs doing something specialised because of what we offered. I think Tim’s diagnosis of the issue is correct for larger teams, generalists provide glue, shortcuts and important cross-cutting expertise. It’s just the actual problem is larger teams are also terrible at finding and integrating generalists because it’s anti-thetical to their working model.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  In usual business environments, generalists are usually not very valued either, but in indirect ways: it's easier to ask for better conditions if you can boast having unique skills or be strong in a specific niche, and a true "generalist" will be expected to move to a management or facilitator role, which makes them regress their technical abilities to some amount, which in turn pushes them to further move down that career path (or out of the company if they want to regain a technical role). I find it fascinating that the gaming industry is faced with similar issues with generalists, where I was expecting a lot more pragmatic choices and better paths for individual contributors even if they're not ultra specialized.
  - meheleventyone 3y ago
    Internally big game teams are pretty indistinguishable from any other larger tech team in how they operate in the large. There’s quite a bit of cross-pollination between the two as well and the whole is driven by wider business culture anyway. In my experience that ends up in being very process rather than results led which is definitely ends up with some perverse incentives.
rob74 3y ago
This observation doesn't only apply to games development, but also to software development in general, e.g. web apps. If every developer working on a project is specialized (DevOps, backend, frontend - even for frontend there are some that only specialize in HTML/CSS and some in JS), they tend to only concentrate on their domain and lose sight of the big picture of how the app should work (or never have that big picture at all), which hurts the quality of the finished product.
a_c 3y ago
This is a pattern even in software industry itself. People specialise too early in their career, zooming closer and closer to a tree, knows everything about a leaf. Fewer and fewer people see the forest. A side effect of specialising is that the skill that you specialise in become a commodity. In the book Finite and Infinite Game, it is said that an infinite game can contain a finite game, but a finite game cannot contain an infinite game. Take it out of context, a generalist is an infinite game, who can be anything, who can be specialised. A specialist, or a specialist organisation is a finite game. Once we started the specialist game, it is turtle all the way down. Everything has to be specialised. So a start up usually start with a bunch of generalists. Over time it specialises into ever granular units
justanotherjoe 3y ago
This article came in a suspiciously close time frameas Timothy Cain's (Fallout dev) youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ihX2e9dnYM&t=624s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ihX2e9dnYM&t=624s)
- Inviz 3y ago
  At the time you posted this, the article didnt have the huge screencap of him from that video?
  - justanotherjoe 3y ago
    this is embarassing. I didn't read the article. I'm sorry for the bad time people must have had reading my useless comment.
JR1427 3y ago
I am much more naturally a generalist. I started as a cell biologist, and now write software full time, but also like hardware, woodwork, literature, etc. Everyone says that to get ahead you need to specialise, but this does not come naturally to me. I think the points people have raised about CVs of generalists often losing out to those of a specialists is true, mostly in terms of getting through the initial screening by the non-technical HR person.
MrScruff 3y ago
I think a good approach is mastering at least one discipline, but having a foundational knowledge of all the other disciplines in your field. I know a lot of people who have almost zero understanding of what their colleagues are doing and that creates a lot of unneccesary friction during collaboration.
gmerc 3y ago
I joined a large publisher with a specifically created hybrid role spanning two disciplines. I had it written in contract and title. Within a year HR approached me to change it because “it confuses people”. When asked who was confused, … they didn’t answer. They came back every year with the same request until I left. Once a certain size is hit in an organization, the org chat and job titles develop an inescapable gravitational pull that only very senior / unreasonably successful people can escape over time.
zubairq 3y ago
I really agree with this article. Knowing how the whole system fits together is essential in my opinion. I guess we need both generalists and specialists
millerhooks 3y ago
It’s REALLY hard to get employed as a generalist. I’m a generalist and it’s best not to let anyone know. It causes people to get competitive in these weird ways and managers don’t know what to do with it.
piroslav 3y ago
i think he meant technical artists

178 points by stevefan1999 3y ago

I thought this was the point of project managers, they're supposed to harmonise various types of specialist when no one generalist can do everything.

lylejantzi3rd 3y ago
That never works in practice. Specialists want to do the thing they specialize in. What happens when you have a bug that bridges across multiple areas of the code? Nobody wants to deal with those bugs because it would mean leaving their area of expertise. This also applies to anything that applies to the game as a whole, like optimization or look and feel.
resonious 3y ago
I think this is true, but even still, having pure communication-overhead roles will probably never outperform a team of generalist ICs. (edit: just my opinion - I have no data for this)
surfpel 3y ago
That’s the point of integration. They’re generalists who are like technical project managers and bridge the gap between teams.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
icegreentea2 3y ago
A good PM will go a long way to mitigating the problems with lack of generalists, but they can only go so far. The heart of the problem is that at some point, you need to make decisions and solve problems where disciplines interact. In the end, you cannot really make an informed decision, or reliability solve problems in these situations without some party actually being able to grasp the cross-disciplinary picture. In the absence of actual generalists, you usually end up with ad-hoc education - crash courses where each discipline tries to educate the other (and the PM), so that they can try to get something hammered out. And this can actually be quite successful - this happens all the time, and works out very often. In fact, this is probably where many generalists (or dual-hatters) organically arise - you get a crash course in some other area while trying to figure out a problem, and then the next time you get tapped because you already have some knowledge, and you find it kinda interesting and the next thing you know, you're a generalist of sorts. I think it's quite true that in large projects you can't possibly have a generalist who actually knows -everything-. But it's also quite possible to have a good bench of dual-hatters (or dunno... 3-4 hatters), who can go a long way to relieving issues.
grensley 3y ago
In my experience they are very limited by their lack of familiarity with the code. They might be a generalist at everything else, but that's a pretty hard ceiling.
- t-writescode 3y ago
  It's the developer's job to help relay the difficulties they're experiencing to the PMs so they can all work together to reduce tech debt or weirdness. And back when I worked at Microsoft, the PMs were call-pattern experts, too, or at least the great ones were.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    We sadly don't have a lot of "great PMs" in games. Pay's not worth it to begin with as a programmer, so they wouldn't make much more (or even less) if they worked as a producer or even PM.

croes 3y ago

Is it even possible nowadays to be a generalist? In science something similar happened. There was a time where some people knew pretty much in every science field, chemistry, physics, biology etc. but the amount of knowledge grew and it become impossible to know enough in every field. Maybe game development isn't any different. You either become an expert in on field or your knowledge is to superficial to actually help.

strken 3y ago
Not sure about game development, but it sounds like a specialist programmer could become a dabbling audio engineer or narrative writer if given the opportunity, or vice versa. Might be a management problem: on a team of ten, you can grab the writer (singular) for coffee and spend a couple of days designing and writing dialogue for a side quest yourself, but on a team of hundreds it must be a lot harder. And then, once you've spend that time using the tools, you can refactor the SpeechOptionNode to incorporate skill checks without attaching a script, or whatever other obscure tooling problems the writers are dealing with.
softsound 3y ago
What do you think most indies are? I'd consider most indies much more generalist. You can't ever know a whole field but you can know pieces of it and once you learn one system it can be easier to know another. I think for example programmers often make very good designers as they will think though problems, handle attention to detail, and work to often find multiple solutions if need be... Wait that sounds like every field doesn't it ;) code, art, design, sound etc. The main issue is mindset, a programmer might cut short a design to save himself time, an artist might simplify the gameplay to not put in as much effort, and a musician or writer might not focus as much on the visuals because they get caught up in how it should it sound/read etc. But they certainly can take on other roles. If you have any experience with start-ups and indies or freelancing you might find yourself take over roles you didn't expect originally. On smaller teams this goes a lot further.
- physicsguy 3y ago
  It’s rare that Indie games are the same technical sophistication though. Nothing wrong with them at all but the scale is just totally different, it’s like running a small bakery shop vs an industrial factory churning out bread for supermarkets

Pannoniae 3y ago

This also explains the declining gameplay and immersion of many (most?) games. The art and the gameplay are simply not synced to each other, so they feel separate and disjoint. For example, the environment having similarly looking but differently behaving objects like rocks. Or how instead of designing emergent systems, most games just slap modifiers on everything and "balance" that way. +20% bow reload speed and +25% speed, anyone?

cynicalkane 3y ago
I think this harmoniousness operates in more subtle ways, too. I'm playing through the new Zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom, and it's a lot of fun, but there's something that doesn't quite click... like the UI is a behavorial engagement layer over the game, and not part of the game itself. Like you can never be completely in the world because something outside is holding your hand all the way. The 16- through 64- bit Zeldas, for their clunkiness, were compellingly immersive. I don't think it's just nostalgia; I've played indie games where the UI is part of a whole that sucks you in. This is true even if the UI has a modern feel, like Hollow Knight, which felt overpolished in its presentation and interface, to me at least, in a way that was off-kilter -- yet something about it sucks you in instead of pulling you out, being part of the world's presentation and in an aesthetically transitive sense part of the world itself. There's something about these modern AAA games where you feel like you're not playing a game but rather a Skinner box containing a game. It's just not the same. I can't exactly put my finger on it.
- softsound 3y ago
  The UI for Tears of the Kingdom has been quite annoying to me in this regard but so many aspects of that game were just troublesome. It's still fun, but the story and characters make no sense, the UI is modern and lifeless. They went into the weeds of the gameplay, you can see that's where they put their energy. I've been disappointed in a lot of the directions... It's just bad furries left and right. This game would sell with most anything they put in it, but it feels lackluster and unmemorable in many areas. I'm probably a minority in thinking the voice actors are trying too hard too.. I do love the idea of being able to go up and down though it feels a little awkward to me as I normally have to go way up to go down into the underground due to a lot of level design. I kinda wish they put some more cliffs nearby to save me the time. I like the underground a lot though and find that part the most fun.

irrational 3y ago

I spent 23+ years doing front end programming, server side programming, database design, sql writing, shell script writing, etc. Recently I was moved into an integration position that primarily used Apache nifi (a gui application) to tie systems together. It is very specialized and quite boring. No code writing required. It feels insane to move a generalist like myself into a specialist position, but they were sunsetting what I had been working on and this was what was open at my same level (at least on paper).

BeetleB 3y ago

I just got done reading Sid Meier's Memoir! He also touts the importance of being a generalist. You can have programming as your primary expertise, but you should have a bare minimal competence in both audio and graphics. On a number of occasions, he'd have a vision for one aspect of his game that the whole team was against, and the way he would convince them would be to make a working prototype of that feature. The audio/graphics would be poor, but they needed to be good enough to demonstrate it and have his team members play. He could get underlings to execute on his vision, but he felt that if they didn't believe in it, they likely would put a lot less effort than he would.

mcv 3y ago
That is an excellent approach. It's always better to have people believe and care instead of simply obey.
Aeolun 3y ago
While this was nice, I also especially like the sections where he realizes he was wrong to keep insisting on doing stuff himself, like when they finally get a dedicated artist and sound designer.
- BeetleB 3y ago
  The two are unrelated. In the latter, he was referring to a dedicated artist/sound designer for the final product. In my comment, he is referring to building a quick prototype to show to the team. Once he's done that, the dedicated folks will make the actual final/production version based on his prototype.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    Oh, yes. I didn’t mean to imply they were mutually exclusive. Just that the one spoke to me more than the other :)

nitwit005 3y ago

The generalist's resume looks worse. They have 2 years experience with (insert role here), compared to the other guy who has 8, because they've worked in multiple roles. Some industries have realized they want some people who have multiple skills, such as the "full stack engineer" roles, but it seems rather more common to prefer someone who precisely fits into the specialist role they defined.

Justsignedup 3y ago
Hell, I experience this a lot. My experience is doing a lot of things, and being a force multiplier. However you go to a larger company, and suddenly they're looking for very specific experience doing specific scaling that I never got to do in all my roles, boom, it is terrible for my resume. And many young people see this and just decide that let's just focus on that, and make a great resume, rather than try to be useful. I could have come into a job and say "okay, I know back end, let me focus on that" but instead I spent a day installing a shitty data pipeline that more or less took us through the next 4 years of data analytical needs for almost no cost. Etc. It is just how it is. I even read a post on HN about a decade ago about how a guy was hire #1, was instrumental in the growth of a company, and when it was purchased was pushed out because they didn't need a generalist anymore, they needed a specialist. And so he decided to drop the generalist role and focus entirely on one technical aspect to the benefit of his career. So while I agree with Tim, I also have to say, as someone in the thick of it, there's no good way out. Unless you want to keep working for Seed / Series A startups, fingers crossed they sell or you won't make that okay payoff.
- taherchhabra 3y ago
  I am in the same boat as you. For generalist,after a point, i feel the only way up is to start something of your own.
  - trinsic2 3y ago
    This is why I dont work for anyone but my customers. There is no way I would deal with the kind of dissonance we are living through today. I do all my design work, my coding, my deduction for people that hire me directly for individual projects. I don't make as much money as I would working for a company, but you can't put a price on piece of mind.

brandensilva 3y ago

I tell you what, the Diablo 4 game is a perfect example of disjointedness that comes from pure specialists with little to no one who is a generalist that can bridge departments together in a way that makes for a better game and experience. And while they have made strides to implementing much of the community feedback for Season 2 many months later after much of the gamers have left, it isn't the same thing as having a leader who already gets the cross disciplinary shortcomings that resulted in such a poor end game that was out of touch and underwhelming. Something only a generalist leader with some authority, gaming experience, gaming systems and design, and passion could pull off.

ycombinete 3y ago
I feel like Chris Wilson's talk Designing Path of Exile to Be Played Forever is a great example of "a generalist leader with some authority, gaming experience, gaming systems and design, and passion": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmuy9fyNUjY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmuy9fyNUjY
- brandensilva 3y ago
  Oh totally and this is exactly what I mean. I've listened to Chris and am a huge fan of his. The depth, experience, and love he puts into POE clearly demonstrates a generalist who gets it. Chris is a linchpin. This is exactly the kind of people Blizzard lacks. They used to exist but they pushed out many of the generalists for the factory model of specialists and haven't really recovered since. That doesn't mean they don't make decent games given the talent of the specialists in art and development, but the game design itself really requires a broader individual or group to bring it together. Thanks for share.
seventhtiger 3y ago
I think Diablo 4 is really well made but I keep getting surprised by some goofs in what I would consider the most important parts of the game. Like even when I make a small scale RPG, my damage formulas and scaling and so on are my bread and butter. I obsess over them. I would accept being wrong about the resulting experience and having to adjust, but to me it's really unacceptable to have oversights and mistakes there. So something like how broken resistance was, or different types of scaling implemented wrong. That's not disagreeing about the outcome. That's clear oversight in what I consider the heart of the game. Or for example how the mount's controls with mouse were just remapped from joystick and you have to put your mouse at the edge of the screen to go fast. I don't understand how to reconcile such a big and well made game with many baffling oversights in the game's core systems. Feels competent and amateurish at the same time.

oooyay 3y ago

This has probably hit the enterprise software world as well, at least from what I can tell. A lot of people are solidly in frontend or backend; backend tends to be even narrowed into asynchronous systems, identity, etc. Finding people who have some high to medium level knowledge in most of the landscape, a more low level background in general computing, and can dig into specific subjects when they need to is exceedingly rare. If I had to guess, generalists look very unfocused to managers and recruiters and are often not considered for TL positions.

rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago
Well then maybe companies should allow for more horizontal mobility for the employees that they already have instead of always hiring from the outside. Or perhaps recruiters should be trained to stop filtering out candidates from another tech stack but with many years of experience because the same patterns apply anyway, only the language is different.
kuchenbecker 3y ago
To some degree Conway's Law [1] in that sufficiently large organizations each team will fulfill a more and more niche specialty. Basically teams get bigger and split into multiple charters, often subcategories of the original team. I've worked in medium to large companies (3k-200k employees) and the smaller companies what is the responsibility of a team would be an entire org in the larger ones. Even getting all the experts in a room is hard when it's the TL and Manager from half a dozen teams. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law
Aeolun 3y ago
What I think is surprising is that even as a generalist you are often more suited to diagnose specialized problems, because you can look further than your own area of expertise.

proc0 3y ago

I think this is related to how games are increasingly live services, therefore approximating the product development of web and as a result adopting some of the practices of that industry. Even for offline single player games, 'early access' and frequent patches are the norm, and so it's not hard to see how the organization starts solving for these problems at the cost of creative cohesion. Games require a unique combination and overlap of creative art and software engineering, something that is hard to measure and quantify... and that is why I think it becomes evident when the leadership of a company is blind to the creative element, maximizing short term business value instead of long term creative value (which arguably has more business value, but it requires passion and love for the craft).

0dayz 3y ago

AFAIK isn't this more because gamedev and general dev has gone separate ways? Gamedev has become so highly specialized due to the lackluster quality games used to have? (There are plenty of ps1 to ps2 games that handles like garbage despite them being good games). That has I think resulted in more "quality" of AAA games but everything is at best a very predictable bland grey goop.

deafpolygon 3y ago

This is true in other industries, not just gaming.

deleted 3y ago

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bitwize 3y ago

I don't work in games. I once saw a glimpse of my boss's notes on me on a screenshare during one of our 1on1s over Teams. The first two bullet points he has about me are something like: * Generalist, has worked in many different areas on different types of software * Thinks that's a bad thing And I do think that's a bad thing, from a career-marketability standpoint anyway. Back in the 80s or 90s, you could get away with being a "guy who knows computers" and they would pretty much stick you anywhere they needed someone who knows computers. And you had to sort of muddle through, figure out what your colleagues needed to do and how to apply the technologies you had on hand to make it easier. Starting in about the 2000s, the enterprise world especially started demanding specialists. They had a J2EE application that needed maintenance and if you didn't know your J2EE backwards and forwards, I'm sorry, there's just no place for you, BOLIYFE[0]. I had spent four years in a robotics company, and then some time at a server appliance company, and the hot thing when I found myself in need of work after those stints was "cloud". If you weren't up on cloud, the industry just couldn't use you. Résumé driven development became a must if you wanted to make a living in the industry. And now those chickens have come home to roost in the gaming industry. Because game development isn't six guys in a strip-mall office messing around, figuring out a way to create something that thrills them at least as much as Mario did. Not anymore. I'll come out and say it: in terms of complexity, budget, and team size, games are enterprise software. Each game is an enormous project, often a distributed system, involving the contributions of hundreds. Games have passed the complexity threshold beyond which no one person can hold even a decent approximation of bigger than a tiny sliver of the whole system in their heads. The dev team is likely to be divided into smaller squads, each of which specialize in a narrow area of the game -- because it has to be. Because each of those areas, alone, is going to be more complex than can be handled by a single person, let alone a small team. And in order to not lose productivity onboarding new people, those people have to have demonstrated expertise in the narrow subset of the whole game whose team they aspire to join, typically by being credited on at least one AAA game title in that area. And generalists, unless they are literally John Carmack or at his level, don't have the deep knowledge it takes to be useful on, say, a AAA game's sound team, or level design team, or gameplay mechanics team, or scenario team. And so we have today the situation where a Hackernews tells a promising kid, put down that homebrew retro console you built out of a Raspberry Pi and learn Unity and Unreal, because that's where you can make a real contribution to the field[1]. And he's right. The industry has changed how it works since the 90s, so in order to stay relevant in the industry you have to change too. Change with the times, or get left behind. Adapt, or die. It was always ever thus. [0] "Best Of Luck In Your Future Endeavors" [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33452920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33452920

meheleventyone 3y ago

I’ve worked in games for twenty years and can safely say there are way more generalists today than there have ever been. Better tools and more awareness simply mean there are way more people making games. Even within large game teams you’ll also find loads of generalists. The issue has never been a lack but that the industry itself crushes you into a box and insists you don’t exist. I’ve sat in meetings where generalists are described as unicorns. There is usually zero organisational impetus to utilise people’s abilities outside of their job spec. There aren’t a lack of generalists, organisations are just blind to their existence and have no understanding of how to use them. As a consequence I’ve always looked for opportunities that let me be a generalist, working on prototyping teams, startups that need you to muck in and now leading a team of generalists making games. Quite a few of my team came from other industry jobs doing something specialised because of what we offered. I think Tim’s diagnosis of the issue is correct for larger teams, generalists provide glue, shortcuts and important cross-cutting expertise. It’s just the actual problem is larger teams are also terrible at finding and integrating generalists because it’s anti-thetical to their working model.

makeitdouble 3y ago
In usual business environments, generalists are usually not very valued either, but in indirect ways: it's easier to ask for better conditions if you can boast having unique skills or be strong in a specific niche, and a true "generalist" will be expected to move to a management or facilitator role, which makes them regress their technical abilities to some amount, which in turn pushes them to further move down that career path (or out of the company if they want to regain a technical role). I find it fascinating that the gaming industry is faced with similar issues with generalists, where I was expecting a lot more pragmatic choices and better paths for individual contributors even if they're not ultra specialized.
- meheleventyone 3y ago
  Internally big game teams are pretty indistinguishable from any other larger tech team in how they operate in the large. There’s quite a bit of cross-pollination between the two as well and the whole is driven by wider business culture anyway. In my experience that ends up in being very process rather than results led which is definitely ends up with some perverse incentives.

rob74 3y ago

This observation doesn't only apply to games development, but also to software development in general, e.g. web apps. If every developer working on a project is specialized (DevOps, backend, frontend - even for frontend there are some that only specialize in HTML/CSS and some in JS), they tend to only concentrate on their domain and lose sight of the big picture of how the app should work (or never have that big picture at all), which hurts the quality of the finished product.

a_c 3y ago

This is a pattern even in software industry itself. People specialise too early in their career, zooming closer and closer to a tree, knows everything about a leaf. Fewer and fewer people see the forest. A side effect of specialising is that the skill that you specialise in become a commodity. In the book Finite and Infinite Game, it is said that an infinite game can contain a finite game, but a finite game cannot contain an infinite game. Take it out of context, a generalist is an infinite game, who can be anything, who can be specialised. A specialist, or a specialist organisation is a finite game. Once we started the specialist game, it is turtle all the way down. Everything has to be specialised. So a start up usually start with a bunch of generalists. Over time it specialises into ever granular units

justanotherjoe 3y ago

This article came in a suspiciously close time frameas Timothy Cain's (Fallout dev) youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ihX2e9dnYM&t=624s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ihX2e9dnYM&t=624s)

Inviz 3y ago
At the time you posted this, the article didnt have the huge screencap of him from that video?
- justanotherjoe 3y ago
  this is embarassing. I didn't read the article. I'm sorry for the bad time people must have had reading my useless comment.

JR1427 3y ago

I am much more naturally a generalist. I started as a cell biologist, and now write software full time, but also like hardware, woodwork, literature, etc. Everyone says that to get ahead you need to specialise, but this does not come naturally to me. I think the points people have raised about CVs of generalists often losing out to those of a specialists is true, mostly in terms of getting through the initial screening by the non-technical HR person.

MrScruff 3y ago

I think a good approach is mastering at least one discipline, but having a foundational knowledge of all the other disciplines in your field. I know a lot of people who have almost zero understanding of what their colleagues are doing and that creates a lot of unneccesary friction during collaboration.

gmerc 3y ago

I joined a large publisher with a specifically created hybrid role spanning two disciplines. I had it written in contract and title. Within a year HR approached me to change it because “it confuses people”. When asked who was confused, … they didn’t answer. They came back every year with the same request until I left. Once a certain size is hit in an organization, the org chat and job titles develop an inescapable gravitational pull that only very senior / unreasonably successful people can escape over time.

zubairq 3y ago

I really agree with this article. Knowing how the whole system fits together is essential in my opinion. I guess we need both generalists and specialists

millerhooks 3y ago

It’s REALLY hard to get employed as a generalist. I’m a generalist and it’s best not to let anyone know. It causes people to get competitive in these weird ways and managers don’t know what to do with it.

piroslav 3y ago

i think he meant technical artists