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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
An early entry where the Drunken Blog Rants format proved itself, and Steve grades the experiment mid-pour: "doing the 'drunken blog entry' really does appear to have better results. Just in case you were planning on writing a blog." He pulled it off the top of a stack of one-third-finished drafts, swore early on not to talk about the software-development side of games (a vow that survives exactly one paragraph), and sourced the whole industry lecture from a cheerfully confessed "4 minutes of research." It is datable to the week — Halo 2's record-breaking launch was the news it shipped into. Even the engine-treadmill observation arrives by accident, in a parenthetical that opens with "Damn," where Steve, making his single editing pass, catches a promise he forgot to keep and pays it off on the spot.
The Amazon vantage gives the piece its flavor: every game-industry horror gets measured against servware life with a straight face, down to unexplained 2004 in-jokes like the 2PTL hot seat. The D&D finale holds more than the calibration pitch: a definitive ruling on what level Gandalf is, and who plays him, plus a two-sentence demolition of the old alignment chart. Buried in the same paragraph is a throwaway promise of some future blog about a keyword-based attribute system "that works for everything" — an idea Steve was evidently already carrying around. The game-conference booth-models passage, meanwhile, has not improved with age.
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