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Not a game dev but I used to dabble in it. Quite surprised by this take honestly. Sure, each domain has its own complex things to solve. But on average, I think

Not a game dev but I used to dabble in it. Quite surprised by this take honestly. Sure, each domain has its own complex things to solve. But on average, I think it's quite safe to say that game development consistently demands more creative solutions to problems compared to many other fields.

miiiiiike 4mo ago
All development requires creativity. Different types of creativity for different types of problems. Creativity isn’t narrowly defined to exclude everything but art, game mechanisms, and narrative. You think the creation of GMail didn’t take creativity? I’m suspicious of anyone who tries to lay a special claim to creativity for their class or type of work. Creates a false creative vs cog narrative that always seems to benefit the speaker.
- Thaxll 4mo ago
  In web dev there is little creativity because everything has been done and there is a library / service to solve every problems, none of that exists in major games. Try Claude in your frontend/backend service, then try that in a game client.
  - miiiiiike 4mo ago
    Games have engines that provide so much. Unreal, Gadot, Unity. Have you tried doing modern frontend work? Creativity is required. I played with Claude recently. It wasn’t able to refactor a CSS one liner into simple sass mixin.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 4mo ago
  I work in big tech but dabbled in games. Games are much harder. Lots of math and you have to process 8 million pixels in 16 milliseconds, in addition to running your physics and NPC AIs. Big tech is 90% CRUD and 90% squabbling over variable names and we somehow think pushing a bit of HTML in 500ms is both hard and acceptable performance.
  - miiiiiike 4mo ago
    Is it harder because you’re less experienced with games. Your big tech job really requires no creativity? Modern sites are extremely complex. BASH, Docker, Kubernetes, Python, Varnish, NGINX, Postgres, Cassandra, Elastic, Redis, Celery, CSS/Sass, Typescript. Observability, logging, build systems, testing, backups, CI, and a consistent design system. That’s all just to get to HTTP 200 “hello world”.
    - chrystalkey 4mo ago
      Well yes sure, but those infrastructure questions come with games as well on top of the whole inherent complexity described in this comment family
    - kelnos 4mo ago
      Complex in the way you're using it (a sea of technologies that looks daunting) doesn't automatically mean "hard". I've worked in big tech on distributed systems, with most of the things in your list, and worked on some difficult problems, but I could absolutely believe that cutting-edge game dev is harder, even significantly so.
      - miiiiiike 4mo ago
        I think you're underestimating your own creativity. My argument is that you can put most good developers into game development and with a little time and experience those devs will find that the work isn't much harder than any other kind of complex development. Most of the questions in game dev like other forms of development are solved. Building a game is like developing any other kind of complex modern system, integrating disparate solutions into a cohesive whole.
    - baobabKoodaa 4mo ago
      Games often have inherent technical complexity. Big tech has mountains of unnecessary complexity just to get to "hello world", as you said. These are different things in nature.
    - 4mo ago
- selfhoster1312 4mo ago
  > You think the creation of GMail didn’t take creativity? Disclaimer: i've barely ever programmed video games Not the same kind of creativity, for sure. Gmail has no performance constraints (and its performance is horrible), has no UX constraint (and its UX is horrible). It pushed the free tier some time ago and was arguably a decent webmail at the time, but nothing about it was revolutionary. The hacks required to get a game to react and push pixels in real time on specific hardware are very interesting. That's closer to proper software engineering than many things we find in startups. That said, more and more games use Unity and other all-in-one engines and are not engineering anymore… and as a player, i can certainly feel the difference in the constant stuttering which mostly was not there when playing console games >10 years ago.

miiiiiike 4mo ago

All development requires creativity. Different types of creativity for different types of problems. Creativity isn’t narrowly defined to exclude everything but art, game mechanisms, and narrative. You think the creation of GMail didn’t take creativity? I’m suspicious of anyone who tries to lay a special claim to creativity for their class or type of work. Creates a false creative vs cog narrative that always seems to benefit the speaker.

Thaxll 4mo ago
In web dev there is little creativity because everything has been done and there is a library / service to solve every problems, none of that exists in major games. Try Claude in your frontend/backend service, then try that in a game client.
- miiiiiike 4mo ago
  Games have engines that provide so much. Unreal, Gadot, Unity. Have you tried doing modern frontend work? Creativity is required. I played with Claude recently. It wasn’t able to refactor a CSS one liner into simple sass mixin.
8n4vidtmkvmk 4mo ago
I work in big tech but dabbled in games. Games are much harder. Lots of math and you have to process 8 million pixels in 16 milliseconds, in addition to running your physics and NPC AIs. Big tech is 90% CRUD and 90% squabbling over variable names and we somehow think pushing a bit of HTML in 500ms is both hard and acceptable performance.
- miiiiiike 4mo ago
  Is it harder because you’re less experienced with games. Your big tech job really requires no creativity? Modern sites are extremely complex. BASH, Docker, Kubernetes, Python, Varnish, NGINX, Postgres, Cassandra, Elastic, Redis, Celery, CSS/Sass, Typescript. Observability, logging, build systems, testing, backups, CI, and a consistent design system. That’s all just to get to HTTP 200 “hello world”.
  - chrystalkey 4mo ago
    Well yes sure, but those infrastructure questions come with games as well on top of the whole inherent complexity described in this comment family
  - kelnos 4mo ago
    Complex in the way you're using it (a sea of technologies that looks daunting) doesn't automatically mean "hard". I've worked in big tech on distributed systems, with most of the things in your list, and worked on some difficult problems, but I could absolutely believe that cutting-edge game dev is harder, even significantly so.
    - miiiiiike 4mo ago
      I think you're underestimating your own creativity. My argument is that you can put most good developers into game development and with a little time and experience those devs will find that the work isn't much harder than any other kind of complex development. Most of the questions in game dev like other forms of development are solved. Building a game is like developing any other kind of complex modern system, integrating disparate solutions into a cohesive whole.
  - baobabKoodaa 4mo ago
    Games often have inherent technical complexity. Big tech has mountains of unnecessary complexity just to get to "hello world", as you said. These are different things in nature.
  - 4mo ago
selfhoster1312 4mo ago
> You think the creation of GMail didn’t take creativity? Disclaimer: i've barely ever programmed video games Not the same kind of creativity, for sure. Gmail has no performance constraints (and its performance is horrible), has no UX constraint (and its UX is horrible). It pushed the free tier some time ago and was arguably a decent webmail at the time, but nothing about it was revolutionary. The hacks required to get a game to react and push pixels in real time on specific hardware are very interesting. That's closer to proper software engineering than many things we find in startups. That said, more and more games use Unity and other all-in-one engines and are not engineering anymore… and as a player, i can certainly feel the difference in the constant stuttering which mostly was not there when playing console games >10 years ago.