[michaelsalim]

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]

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.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

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]

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”.

[oreally]

Sure they're complex but tbh they don't need to be. Sorry to bruise your professional ego but you should understand that there's a lot of decisions in bigtech/corporate that equates to 'buy it don't build it, it'll be cheaper, and (secretly) I can show it off on my resume'. And then when you use it, usually it isn't catered for the business' purposes because the tech is meant to cover a large amount of use cases. At that point they move on and the inefficiencies become the norm.

And these require none of the deep math that the lower levels of gamedev stack require. It's tedious, not hard to string all of these web components.

[miiiiiike]

I'm at a loss when it comes to this comment section. I'm not sure why most people here seem to think that web development is just querying a database and presenting the results.

I'm often doing math when working with ranking (search and otherwise) and throttling/rate-limiting. What about fraud detection and prevention? There isn't an off-the-shelf solution that you can use to build a modern site. It requires hundreds of hours of hard work and an understanding of everything from binary to color theory.

The job of a full-stack developer has a lot of complexity and requires a great deal of creativity. Game dev too.

I'm not sure why my ego would be bruised by anything you said. None of it applies to my work.

[oreally]

Are you just throwing out buzzwords at this point?

What has ranking have to do with the standard website? Or fraud detection/prevention? Clearly these are out of the scope of the standard website. And I highly doubt they require deep math, just some probability, maybe a slight use of matrices.

Given the number of surface level buzzwords you throw out, I think your ego's preventing you from looking deeper.

[tester756]

>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”.

A lot of fancy keywords, but

1) It's the stack that you decided to put your services on, your HTTP 200 could be also served by nginx + 1 html file

2) You can make empty video multiplayer game which will sound as fancy as that HTTP 200 hello world

[miiiiiike]

Deliberately misunderstanding my point while making my point!

Yes! Games are complex! An empty site with modern infrastructure is just as complex as an empty multiplayer video game, exactly, we agree!

However, NGINX+a file isn't going to get you very far. You know that.

[baobabKoodaa]

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.

[kelnos]

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]

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.

[chrystalkey]

Well yes sure, but those infrastructure questions come with games as well on top of the whole inherent complexity described in this comment family

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

Could be. I've been using most of the technologies you listed for over 20 years so none of that is really hard for me anymore.

[selfhoster1312]

> 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.

[Thaxll]

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]

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.