
Developers, don't mock people for being amazed by game dev techniques - amarifenix
http://www.polygon.com/2017/4/18/15340296/horizon-zero-dawn-kotaku-developer-backlash
======
scryder
I'm not sure about this article's core assumption that sharing this type of
knowledge in clear and understandable forms is a good thing.

Just as magicians often agree not to share how a trick is done, because doing
so kills the joy of the magic for many viewers, I wonder if doing so for game
design weakens the power of video games as a medium.

This kind of article will change perceptions of "a hugely expansive, beautiful
world" for many laymen into "well optimized frustrum culling".

In the end, I'm not sure we should assume that just because someone can learn
about these things, that we should go out of our way to show people how
they're done. Something is lost.

~~~
FroshKiller
I disagree. As a child, I first thought video games contained pictures of
everything that could possibly be drawn on the screen. And I don't mean
sprites--I mean that there must be a separate picture for every possible
position the frog could be in and every possible car in every possible spot on
the road.

My mother was a programmer, but she didn't make video games, so she had a hard
time answering my questions about how video games worked. The only reference
materials I had were manuals for the C64 and similar machines, where they
talked vaguely about PEEK and POKE and sprites. The technical details of video
games were impenetrable to me.

In middle school, I played DOOM for the first time. I got a shareware CD with
the DOOM FAQ, which talked about editing the game. I understood intellectually
what a file was and that the files contained the images, sounds, and levels
for the game, but I didn't know how editing the game worked, exactly.

I told my mother that the game could be "edited" but that I didn't know how to
do it. She sat down with me and showed me how to launch the only "editor" she
could think of on our home PC: edit doom1.wad

Of course, the data was meaningless to me, but the possibilities made me even
more determined to understand. As I learned more about how that game worked, I
learned more about how all games work. As I learned more about how all games
work, I learned more about...everything, really.

The thing about learning the trick is that it usually makes people appreciate
magic more. Knowing that the coin only "disappears" because the magician
distracted you is useful and interesting, and the "trick" of it doesn't
detract from the showmanship. Games are the same. Knowing something about how
an effect is achieved doesn't diminish its power if it's expressed well.

As a programmer, it frustrates me when people perceive what I do as somehow
magical or impossible for them to understand. It isn't, and it doesn't help
any of us to perpetuate that misconception. If I hadn't learned how something
as prosaic as DOOM's demo recording & playback worked, I don't know what I'd
even be like today. I certainly wouldn't be a programmer, and I imagine I
wouldn't be as happy and curious. I don't care what you think is lost in
explanation--what's gained is so much more important.

