Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

I’ve worked in games for twenty years and can safely say there are way more generalists today than there have ever been. Better tools and more awareness simply mean there are way more people making games. Even within large game teams you’ll also find loads of generalists.<p>The issue has never been a lack but that the industry itself crushes you into a box and insists you don’t exist. I’ve sat in meetings where generalists are described as unicorns. There is usually zero organisational impetus to utilise people’s abilities outside of their job spec. There aren’t a lack of generalists, organisations are just blind to their existence and have no understanding of how to use them.<p>As a consequence I’ve always looked for opportunities that let me be a generalist, working on prototyping teams, startups that need you to muck in and now leading a team of generalists making games. Quite a few of my team came from other industry jobs doing something specialised because of what we offered.<p>I think Tim’s diagnosis of the issue is correct for larger teams, generalists provide glue, shortcuts and important cross-cutting expertise. It’s just the actual problem is larger teams are also terrible at finding and integrating generalists because it’s anti-thetical to their working model.

I just got done reading <i>Sid Meier&#x27;s Memoir!</i> He also touts the importance of being a generalist. You can have programming as your primary expertise, but you should have a bare minimal competence in both audio and graphics. On a number of occasions, he&#x27;d have a vision for one aspect of his game that the whole team was against, and the way he would convince them would be to make a working prototype of that feature. The audio&#x2F;graphics would be poor, but they needed to be good enough to demonstrate it and have his team members play.<p>He could get underlings to execute on his vision, but he felt that if they didn&#x27;t believe in it, they likely would put a lot less effort than he would.

The generalist&#x27;s resume looks worse. They have 2 years experience with (insert role here), compared to the other guy who has 8, because they&#x27;ve worked in multiple roles.<p>Some industries have realized they want some people who have multiple skills, such as the &quot;full stack engineer&quot; roles, but it seems rather more common to prefer someone who precisely fits into the specialist role they defined.

I tell you what, the Diablo 4 game is a perfect example of disjointedness that comes from pure specialists with little to no one who is a generalist that can bridge departments together in a way that makes for a better game and experience. And while they have made strides to implementing much of the community feedback for Season 2 many months later after much of the gamers have left, it isn&#x27;t the same thing as having a leader who already gets the cross disciplinary shortcomings that resulted in such a poor end game that was out of touch and underwhelming. Something only a generalist leader with some authority, gaming experience, gaming systems and design, and passion could pull off.

Is it even possible nowadays to be a generalist?<p>In science something similar happened. There was a time where some people knew pretty much in every science field, chemistry, physics, biology etc. but the amount of knowledge grew and it become impossible to know enough in every field.<p>Maybe game development isn&#x27;t any different. You either become an expert in on field or your knowledge is to superficial to actually help.

I joined a large publisher with a specifically created hybrid role spanning two disciplines. I had it written in contract and title.<p>Within a year HR approached me to change it because “it confuses people”.<p>When asked who was confused, … they didn’t answer.<p>They came back every year with the same request until I left.<p>Once a certain size is hit in an organization, the org chat and job titles develop an inescapable gravitational pull that only very senior &#x2F; unreasonably successful people can escape over time.

I spent 23+ years doing front end programming, server side programming, database design, sql writing, shell script writing, etc. Recently I was moved into an integration position that primarily used Apache nifi (a gui application) to tie systems together. It is very specialized and quite boring. No code writing required. It feels insane to move a generalist like myself into a specialist position, but they were sunsetting what I had been working on and this was what was open at my same level (at least on paper).

This observation doesn&#x27;t only apply to games development, but also to software development in general, e.g. web apps. If every developer working on a project is specialized (DevOps, backend, frontend - even for frontend there are some that only specialize in HTML&#x2F;CSS and some in JS), they tend to only concentrate on their domain and lose sight of the big picture of how the app should work (or never have that big picture at all), which hurts the quality of the finished product.

This is a pattern even in software industry itself. People specialise too early in their career, zooming closer and closer to a tree, knows everything about a leaf. Fewer and fewer people see the forest. A side effect of specialising is that the skill that you specialise in become a commodity. In the book Finite and Infinite Game, it is said that an infinite game can contain a finite game, but a finite game cannot contain an infinite game. Take it out of context, a generalist is an infinite game, who can be anything, who can be specialised. A specialist, or a specialist organisation is a finite game. Once we started the specialist game, it is turtle all the way down. Everything has to be specialised. So a start up usually start with a bunch of generalists. Over time it specialises into ever granular units

I thought this was the point of project managers, they&#x27;re supposed to harmonise various types of specialist when no one generalist can do everything.

This has probably hit the enterprise software world as well, at least from what I can tell. A lot of people are solidly in frontend or backend; backend tends to be even narrowed into asynchronous systems, identity, etc. Finding people who have some high to medium level knowledge in most of the landscape, a more low level background in general computing, and can dig into specific subjects when they need to is exceedingly rare.<p>If I had to guess, generalists look very unfocused to managers and recruiters and are often not considered for TL positions.

I think this is related to how games are increasingly live services, therefore approximating the product development of web and as a result adopting some of the practices of that industry. Even for offline single player games, &#x27;early access&#x27; and frequent patches are the norm, and so it&#x27;s not hard to see how the organization starts solving for these problems at the cost of creative cohesion.<p>Games require a unique combination and overlap of creative art and software engineering, something that is hard to measure and quantify... and that is why I think it becomes evident when the leadership of a company is blind to the creative element, maximizing short term business value instead of long term creative value (which arguably has more business value, but it requires passion and love for the craft).

This also explains the declining gameplay and immersion of many (most?) games. The art and the gameplay are simply not synced to each other, so they feel separate and disjoint. For example, the environment having similarly looking but differently behaving objects like rocks.<p>Or how instead of designing emergent systems, most games just slap modifiers on everything and &quot;balance&quot; that way. +20% bow reload speed and +25% speed, anyone?

I am much more naturally a generalist. I started as a cell biologist, and now write software full time, but also like hardware, woodwork, literature, etc.<p>Everyone says that to get ahead you need to specialise, but this does not come naturally to me.<p>I think the points people have raised about CVs of generalists often losing out to those of a specialists is true, mostly in terms of getting through the initial screening by the non-technical HR person.

I think a good approach is mastering at least one discipline, but having a foundational knowledge of all the other disciplines in your field.<p>I know a lot of people who have almost zero understanding of what their colleagues are doing and that creates a lot of unneccesary friction during collaboration.

I really agree with this article. Knowing how the whole system fits together is essential in my opinion. I guess we need both generalists and specialists

AFAIK isn&#x27;t this more because gamedev and general dev has gone separate ways?<p>Gamedev has become so highly specialized due to the lackluster quality games used to have? (There are plenty of ps1 to ps2 games that handles like garbage despite them being good games).<p>That has I think resulted in more &quot;quality&quot; of AAA games but everything is at best a very predictable bland grey goop.

This article came in a suspiciously close time frameas Timothy Cain&#x27;s (Fallout dev) youtube video (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_ihX2e9dnYM&amp;t=624s">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_ihX2e9dnYM&amp;t=624s</a>)

It’s REALLY hard to get employed as a generalist. I’m a generalist and it’s best not to let anyone know. It causes people to get competitive in these weird ways and managers don’t know what to do with it.

This is true in other industries, not just gaming.

I don&#x27;t work in games. I once saw a glimpse of my boss&#x27;s notes on me on a screenshare during one of our 1on1s over Teams. The first two bullet points he has about me are something like:<p>* Generalist, has worked in many different areas on different types of software<p>* Thinks that&#x27;s a bad thing<p>And I <i>do</i> think that&#x27;s a bad thing, from a career-marketability standpoint anyway. Back in the 80s or 90s, you could get away with being a &quot;guy who knows computers&quot; and they would pretty much stick you anywhere they needed someone who knows computers. And you had to sort of muddle through, figure out what your colleagues needed to do and how to apply the technologies you had on hand to make it easier. Starting in about the 2000s, the enterprise world especially started demanding specialists. They had a J2EE application that needed maintenance and if you didn&#x27;t know your J2EE backwards and forwards, I&#x27;m sorry, there&#x27;s just no place for you, BOLIYFE[0].<p>I had spent four years in a robotics company, and then some time at a server appliance company, and the hot thing when I found myself in need of work after those stints was &quot;cloud&quot;. If you weren&#x27;t up on cloud, the industry just couldn&#x27;t use you. Résumé driven development became a must if you wanted to make a living in the industry.<p>And now those chickens have come home to roost in the gaming industry. Because game development isn&#x27;t six guys in a strip-mall office messing around, figuring out a way to create something that thrills them at least as much as Mario did. Not anymore. I&#x27;ll come out and say it: in terms of complexity, budget, and team size, games are enterprise software. Each game is an enormous project, often a distributed system, involving the contributions of hundreds. Games have passed the complexity threshold beyond which no one person can hold even a decent approximation of bigger than a tiny sliver of the whole system in their heads. The dev team is likely to be divided into smaller squads, each of which specialize in a narrow area of the game -- because it has to be. Because each of those areas, alone, is going to be more complex than can be handled by a single person, let alone a small team. And in order to not lose productivity onboarding new people, those people have to have demonstrated expertise in the narrow subset of the whole game whose team they aspire to join, typically by being credited on at least one AAA game title in that area. And generalists, unless they are literally John Carmack or at his level, don&#x27;t have the deep knowledge it takes to be useful on, say, a AAA game&#x27;s sound team, or level design team, or gameplay mechanics team, or scenario team.<p>And so we have today the situation where a Hackernews tells a promising kid, put down that homebrew retro console you built out of a Raspberry Pi and learn Unity and Unreal, because that&#x27;s where you can make a real contribution to the field[1]. And he&#x27;s right. The industry has changed how it works since the 90s, so in order to stay relevant in the industry you have to change too. Change with the times, or get left behind. Adapt, or die. It was always ever thus.<p>[0] &quot;Best Of Luck In Your Future Endeavors&quot;<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33452920">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33452920</a>

i think he meant technical artists