[adamrezich]

Some gates need to be kept!

If you meet someone at a party who self-describes as a carpenter, and you say, “oh that's awesome, I've been trying to add onto my deck by myself with no prior knowledge of carpentry and I'm running into trouble, can you give me some pointers?” and he replies, “oh I don't actually know anything at all about carpentry, I've never done carpentry before, I just design mass-produced wooden products in CAD software”, then you'd probably ask, “okay, well why do you self-describe as a carpenter, then?”

If the term used to describe a craftsman of a given craft grows to include people who don't actually know anything about said craft other than engaging with higher-level abstractions over core practices of said craft, then what value does the term continue to have?

The idea that “gatekeeping” is always a bad word (for ill-defined wishy-washy reasons) is asinine, and the sooner we recognize this, the better.

[MattRix]

I didn’t say gatekeeping was always a bad word, in fact I think some gatekeeping is often justified when it comes to AI art.

As far as the carpenter stuff, I feel like your metaphor is once again going much too far. Someone can be a carpenter whether they buy their wood at home depot or grow the trees themselves… but it would be foolish to say that the person who buys the wood pre-grown is not a real carpenter.

We are talking about game developers, not engine developers. If someone wants to be a game dev, they have to have developed the game, but not the underlying engine. I don’t see how this is controversial.

[adamrezich]

It's only “controversial” because you're thinking in framing terms that don't necessarily reflect reality—“making a game” and “making a game engine” don't need to be distinct, disparate things.

When Ska Studios (a husband and wife) made Salt and Sanctuary, they just made a game using a library, and a framework that they've evolved over many years of using XNA and then later FNA (both libraries, not engines!), to make their games. They don't “do engine programming” and then “do game programming” as separate acts done by separate people of separate disciplines—they're one and the same!

The whole point I've been getting at in my posts here is that “game engine programming and game development are necessarily distinct, practically unrelated disciplines” is a false premise that people have recently come to believe, and one that I believe deserves significant pushback.

My carpenter metaphor was just fine, you're the one making it more convoluted—when has “carpenter” ever been defined to include “one who grows his own lumber” in its definition, at any point in human history? That was never the case—“carpentry” is the practice of crafting things out of wood, and a “carpenter” is one who engages in and has knowledge of the practice of “carpentry”.

Thus, one who uses CAD software to design products that a factory will mass-produce using wood as a material could be technically referred to as a “carpenter”, because “crafting things out of wood” is, in an abstract sense, what they are doing. But it's clearly disingenuous for such a person, who lacks any knowledge or experience in “traditional” “carpentry”, to self-describe as such, precisely because he lacks the domain knowledge and experience that is expected of someone of such a self-description.

But if an actual carpenter, with actual carpentry knowledge and experience, then goes on to design mass-produced wooden products with CAD software, and he self-describes as a “carpenter” when you meet him at a party, you may think his self-description is a bit odd given what he does for a living—but at least he will in fact be able to give you some pointers about building your deck—thus proving his self-description to be meaningful on some level.

[MattRix]

Do you honestly think it is disingenuous for someone to call themselves a game developer if they didn’t write the engine as well?

[adamrezich]

Where did I ever say that?

I thought the last paragraph of my previous post made it pretty clear that I rather specifically don't think that.

[MattRix]

Well again, this is the problem with how far you’ve stretched the carpentry comparison. You said it was disingenuous for the CAD user to call themselves a carpenter… and as far as I understand, the CAD user is your equivalent of a game dev who only uses engines.

If your argument is just that sometimes game devs can also make the engine at the same time as making the game, then yeah I agree with that… but I think your earlier posts were saying a lot more than that (such as implying that engine users aren’t really game developers and are basically equivalent to AI art prompters).

Also it’s a little funny you bring up the example of an XNA/FNA game, because that’s already a relatively high level framework, the kind of code those devs would use is really quite similar to using an engine, especially another C# engine like Unity.

[adamrezich]

If you use someone else's high-level game engine to make a game (metaphor: use CAD software to design mass-produced wooden products), but you could write a simple game yourself “from scratch (with libraries)” (you have carpentry experience), then you're a game developer (carpenter). If not, then you're not, you're a proficient tool-user, with no domain knowledge outside of how to use said tool.

> Also it’s a little funny you bring up the example of an XNA/FNA game, because that’s already a relatively high level framework, the kind of code those devs would use is really quite similar to using an engine, especially another C# engine like Unity.

This is untrue and you know it. XNA/FNA does not have a GUI editor, a scene graph, a physics engine, an entity/component system, and many other things that Unity et al. have. When you use XNA/FNA(/MonoGame), you have to figure out how to structure your game logic yourself. The structure you think in terms of is by and large something that you've written yourself, as opposed to with something like Unity, where a complete structure is provided for you, and you learn to think in terms of the primitives it exposes to you (GameObjects, Components, Prefabs, Scenes).