Code is not the value, you're gatekeeping boilerplate

I started writing this issue like a meltdown. Inspired by ignorants talking bullshit on the Internet, and their sheeple clapping to everything they say.

But instead I went to bed and woke up realizing something...

You remember Marcus Notch Persson? The maker of Minecraft, OG Indie Games Jesus¹, who sold his life’s work to Microslop² and become that interesting social media persona. Many funny anecdotes about him can be told, definitely.

You can tell he was high on something last month...

I won’t go deep into responses, but they were two kinds of:

• “No”

• “Thanks, Satan.”

• “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point.”

I mean, Notch is hardly Satan. He’s also not the Worst Person. Maybe the worst Persson, but to be sure I’d have to know other Perssons, and I hardly know this one.

But give a persson ten days and he’s like:

Outside of the fact that he will “feel less bad about firing a chat bot” which tells everyone that he crossed the river of “I make millions of dollars, people are Excel shits to me”.

But, of course, he sees the first benefit: making the “dull tools” faster. Like a map editor, a node graph visualizer (I wonder what’s that for?), but also bounce esoteric ideas at.

When you think about, there’s a whole lot of tools you might want to build faster. In the end every game is a collection of data files. And managing data files manually is a Goddamn’ CHORE!

You might prioritize art, music, and story script. But one thing is to just make art and the other is to make them work inside your game, work along your game engine. After all, a game is more than just a book you can read. It’s an entire system.

In the end, to make your game you need a shitload of tools. You can have a game engine with all those tools implemented, but the truth is: someone handpicked those tools for you, and you still have to learn how to use them!

Sure you can make fun of vibe coders. And other people who want to one-shot everything. And investors who believe in this shit.

(You can study notch’s tweets here: https://x.com/notch. Not the most often updated profile 😉)

But he’s not the first person to achieve much in gaming or IT to speak positively about recent AI usages. Where notch is giving you his diary from the trenches, John Carmack shows you AI from the perspective of how the software architecture was changing:

Source

I read the first sentence and I know why this guy deserves a gaming temple!

Hear that, anti-AI folks talking about “replacing talent of coders” or that “slop is slop”? CODING IS NOT THE SOURCE OF VALUE! You solve problems. Code solves problem. You design the solution, or use design patterns or other people’s knowledge (and yes, since AI is trained on the Internet it basically means it has this knowledge).

Comparing anti-AI to a person who uses Assembly Language and doesn’t want to switch to C seems spot on!

But wait, there’s more!

Source

Notice the paragraph about the tools and manual labor for game devs.

Game engines, y’know that automation tool that makes your coder talent useless and turns you into a scripter and not a proper game developer (wink wink), actually opened the doors for people to get into game development. Could it be that AI can do the same for you?

AI tools will allow the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics.

That is the opinion of the guy who created the first person perspective game genre. Have that in mind. This is not a rich-investor-moron with an opinion. This is American answer to Shigeru Miyamoto.

Although I’m not that sure when reading

we will get to a world where you can get an interactive game (or novel, or movie) out of a prompt

But I understand people who won’t be wanting to read/watch that. After all, one prompt to create a script, design characters, and so on. It’s not impossible, but that part of AI is something I do not buy for many reasons. It might work, but not on a regular basis.

I like the answer to John’s tweet that right under:

Because it’s the same with 99% of gaming without AI.

Games are 90% boilerplate

Hear me out! Maybe 1% of game devs are doing something fresh. The rest just remodels the blocks.

That’s what indies do these days. They create tutorial so people can copy their solutions. People search for these tutorials to know how to implement a mechanic they don’t know how to implement. You derive what your game is from the work of others all the time. You are not original. Your script might be different, your art might be different, but your game in 99% is not. Sorry to put it that way. When did you last played a game that was completely different from everything that is on the market? You didn’t. These times are over. All games resemble other games. This is the postmodernism of games.

You might think it’s not true, but you use a game engine and that is 80% of the boilerplate, because a lot of people use the same engine as you do 😉 Nobody cancels such people, but AI-using people yes?

How is it that people are so worried about “coder talent” and yet sleeps on the fact that most of the people copy tutorials?

Canceling people who just use new tools and not just another game engine is just gatekeeping.

Why don’t gamers listen to accomplished game developers?

Well, they’re obviously not that liked these days. Their experience doesn’t matter for today’s gamers. Or gamers think they are just wrong.

But I prefer to listen to competent people.

Experienced people.

People I’d learn from.

1. I think this is taken now by Jonathan Blow… what is it with indie Jesuses and no hair?

2. Not because they use AI but because of the quality of their deliverables and decisions