I think he’s making an argument that you can make games with much less code than we do now, not a serious argument that we should only make games that fit on a business card.
Yes. The same would apply to other areas as well. For example, a colleague of mine set up this weird elaborate web based data processing thing so that we could automate processing of files. I did the same thing he was trying to achieve with a couple of perl one-liners.
Maybe comparing business card games to AAA is a bad comparison, but comparing 'Return of the Obra Dinn' with 'LA Noire' might be more apt.
Totally agree. The current version of Nethack is ~204k lines of code. Modern AAA games have millions of lines. I don't think there's an order of magnitude more depth to most AAA games than there is in Nethack.
Probably not terribly bloated, just old. The language (C), features (probably K&R C), libraries (pitiful compared to today), and portability concerns (nethack was ported to many platforms, DF comparatively few) it originally had to contend with made for a very different world back then. While I'm sure it's been updated/cleaned up over the decades, it probably still carries a lot of that design/baggage from the time it was written in.
Maybe comparing business card games to AAA is a bad comparison, but comparing 'Return of the Obra Dinn' with 'LA Noire' might be more apt.