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A Software Fable
Author’s note
This is a surprisingly funny rant in the first half, talking about the video game Fable. It goes into a bit too much length about video-game roles, but the last part, about the leveling system, turns out to be another prediction come true. Twenty years later, RPG-style character skill sheets, auto-generated from AI traces, are now all the rage.
AI Notes
Written as a deliberately drunken blog entry in November 2004 on the pretext of having played Lionhead's Fable on the Xbox for a week. The opening drifts through Steve's console history, a sour take on Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles and its carry-the-jug-of-beano mechanic, and the admission that he plays two games a year and this is going to be one of them. The middle is Game Industry 101 as told by an Amazon outsider with a friend at EA: the industry is a grillion-dollar industry, Wal-Mart moves a quarter of all US console game sales, and the headcount is unlike anything in servware. Producers (part-VC, part-backstabber). Directors (part-visionary, part-scapegoat). Voice actors. Motion-capture actors. A permanent reserve army of art-institute graduates working for less than minimum wage. Buried in a parenthetical mid-essay is the observation that became most-quoted: game engines get rewritten from scratch on every title because the team is always in demo mode, hacking whatever's needed to hit the next producer milestone. Steve frames it as a horror story; twenty years on, it is also a recognisable description of how a great deal of non-games software gets built.
The closing turn is the joke that turned out to have weight. The One True Calibration System for engineers, Steve proposes, is the Dungeons & Dragons level system: everyone has played it, the curve is roughly 1.5x so the first few levels go quickly and the later ones take years, and XP corresponds to delivered work in an obvious way. The serious companion four years later is Done, and Gets Things Smart, where Steve takes the same instinct on without the costume.
Related listings
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2008
Four Console Games You Might Like
Four years on, Steve writes the more conventional games recommendation post. A Software Fable is the rougher first pass at the same instinct — using a console RPG as a lens onto how the rest of the industry works.
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2008
Done, and Gets Things Smart
The serious version of the calibration argument. Where A Software Fable jokes about D&D levels, Done, and Gets Things Smart says the things-that-actually-predict-engineer-value out loud.
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2007
Tour de Babel
Same rhetorical move three years later: take a particular thing Steve is doing right now (here, playing Fable; there, walking through languages), and use it as a frame for a wider claim about software culture.
From the peanut gallery
Read the rest of the thread · 1 more
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Um, Steve, drop the jug and report to the nearest beano tree. Pronto.
Artists actually tend to outnumber programmers on most game dev teams, in my experience.
It's not true that all game engines are rewritten from scratch, unless you're implicitly excluding sequels and the like. Even then, there are commodity game engines that are used (and reused) in best sellers.
— Andrew W · November 9, 2004 02:55 AM