Sunday Thoughts: Cooking A Game

I’m a computer programmer by trade, although my day job these days is keeping out of Alex’s way and therefore the smooth running of TSA.  However, being a computer programmer means one thing: I like to look at how other people do things and then say, in a really questioning tone, “Oh, you did it like that?  Interesting.”  Which translates to, of course, “WTF?!!?”

The sort of programming I’ve done in the past has been a doddle.  Stuff like taking a hospital’s patient data from the old system, transforming into a format conforming to a file specification seemingly written by chimps, and then migrating the data into a new system.  The only clinical risk to a flawed implementation would be patient death due to inaccurate patient records, which is clearly not as bad as, say, having Bob Kotick being mad at you because your game had a bug in it.

Therefore, I know I’m not as good as game developers.  And that’s why I decided to look at other workplaces to see if I could learn from them.  So, I did.

I went to visit a friend of mine a couple of days ago, at his restaurant.  I went to his restaurant because I don’t have a restaurant so we couldn’t meet there, and also because his restaurant serves fantastic food that I don’t have to pay for.  He’s a bit of a good chef my friend, and so like all good chefs he no longer does any cooking whatsoever.

Instead, he runs the kitchen in a frankly bafflingly inefficient manner involving lots of shouting.  Despite the seemingly chaotic nature, the food is always perfectly cooked and presented and served on time.  I wondered if there ought to be more shouting involved in the development of video games, so I asked him.

“Chef, should game development involve more shouting?” I said.

“Eh?” he said.

“SHOULD GAME DEVELOPMENT INVOLVE MORE BLOODY SHOUTING?” I said.

In the interests of this article not descending into a swear-fest that would embarrass even Ramsay, I’ve taken the liberty of editing the conversation from this point on to keep it clean.

“A lot more shouting.  Some swearing too,” he said.

“Why would that help, do you think?”

“If there’s a big, shouty, sweary genius in charge it can’t help but motivate the workers.”

“Do you not worry about employee retention?”

“No.  An untrained chimp can chop veg and prepare the dishes I design.  I can’t imagine game development is any different.”

“Er, well I think it’s…”

“And burning.”

“Burning?”

“Yes, they ought to get burned more often.”

“You mean like burning more beta disks to aid testing?”

“No, I mean like picking up a red-hot pan without using a tea-towel.”

“Er…”

“They should keep some of those Xbox 360s handy for just that purpose.”

“And burning helps how?”

“Well, it makes you remember your tea-towel in future.”

“I’m struggling to see the importance…”

“And there’s not enough tasting.”

“Testing?”

“No, tasting.  Always carry a spoon so you can test the food.”

“Or a joypad so you can test the game?”

“Joypads are cumbersome.  A spoon is better.  If games were controlled by spoon then quality control would improve.”

Despite thinking that he was making the sort of sense that Gordon Brown made during the 10p tax debacle, I found myself starting to identify with what Chef was saying.  As this was clearly a bad thing, I suggested we leave the kitchen and go and sample some of the food instead.

I chose Xbox 360-fried, sorry pan-fried scallops for my starter, but when they arrived Chef wasn’t happy with them and sent them back.  Five minutes later another set appeared, and again Chef sent them back, and five minutes after that I took delivery of scallops he deemed worthy.

“Game developers are lazy,” he said.

“What?  How so?” I said.

“They only make one thing.  And they make it once.  And it takes them an age to do so.”

“Well, yes but that’s because…”

“We make the same thing a hundred times a night, for weeks on end.”

“Sure, but then nobody would eat at your restaurant if it took 3 years…”

“We get good at what we do; the repetition makes every dish perfect.  Or a ten as you people call it.”

“Well, no a ten isn’t a measure of perfection, it’s…”

“And if we do make a mistake, we prepare a new dish for the customer and don’t make them wait weeks for the…what do you call it?”

“The patch?”

“Right.  So, we produce more products than developers, more often, and at a better quality.”

“I see, but that’s not really fair, because…”

“Lazy.  Imagine how good Fallout 3 would have been if they’d produced a new, better version every day for four weeks?”

“Well, I don’t see how that would be possible, it’s not like…”

“They don’t even create everything from scratch like we do.”

“What do you mean?”

“I make my famous chocolate pudding from all sorts of quality ingredients.”

“Game developers do the same!”

“No.  If they want to include some physics, they buy someone else’s physics and use that.  They may as well be heating up frozen meals at the local Little Chef.”

“I think you’re vastly underestimating…”

“And they’re all fat.”

“?”

“No, sorry that’s chefs.  I’ll give the developers that; they aren’t as fat as us.  In fact, given their lack of girth, you’d think they’d be fit enough to work as hard as us.”

By now I’d sampled a stunning main course and the famous chocolate pudding, but I wasn’t altogether sure I’d learned lessons that could help improve game development.

Still, chocolate pudding; who cares about games?