“You can draw any kind of picture you want on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.”
– Robert Moses, 1976
People who are new to game development often harbor the mistaken belief that it is simply about coming up with neat ideas to implement; the ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if…’ guy, or simply WIBCI (we’ll call him “Wibsy”).
Wibsy is dangerous to your project in all his forms…
If Wibsy is tasked with creating artwork, he won’t be knocking down your vital assets list, and instead will spend hours painting Easter Eggs that most people will never see.
Wibsy, the programmer, won’t be working on basic mechanics (e.g., player movement, collision, etc.). He’ll put all his time into making a barrel that explodes a bridge (which means your artist now has to create barrel and bridge sprites) that appears exactly once and is never used again. But the worst kind is…
Wibsy the “Game Designer”
This is Wibsy’s final and most dreaded form! The Game Designer determines how the game works (its rules, mechanics, systems, goals, etc.). From these blueprints, the programmer builds your game, and the artist gets to work decorating it. These rules, mechanics, systems, and goals need to be well thought out and clearly communicated so that everyone shares the same vision for what’s being created.
Wibsy, the Game Designer, isn’t a good communicator, and instead expects others to understand his ideas intuitively…here’s a sample conversation between Wibsy and the programmer:
Wibsy: “In level one, I want the player to be able to jump, swim, and attack in every direction. In level two, the player will have a jetpack, but instead of top-down, it will ‘Metroidvania’ style. In level 3, I want a box stacking simulator with neat physics. In level 4…”
Programmer: “Hang on a second – that would mean programming an entire game each level, essentially coding 30 games instead of just the one?”
Wibsy: “Yes. This is my vision, go and program it.”
Wibsy is not concerned with scope, budget, or time; that’s someone else’s problem! Never underestimate Wibsy’s unlimited capacity for ambiguity, distraction, and scope creep.
So what can you do about it?
Dealing with Wibsy
The easiest solution is: don’t. But if you must, here are some suggestions:
1. Consider helping them – guide them to resources, give them suggestions, try to help them understand that there is no room for an ‘ideas’ guy in a project. Ideas are cheap, plentiful, and most of them are bad. Instead, bring something useful to the table and stay focused on the critical path.
2. Challenge them – force them to think their decisions through, ask them questions, and let them [hopefully] arrive at the right conclusion.
3. Constrain them – ideas are infinite, time and resources are finite. One way to limit scope is to introduce constraints, real or contrived. Examples could limit the project to one core mechanic or to a palette of 16 colors, etc. You’d be amazed at what a difference this can make – a good example of this is Micro Mages.
At the end of the day, it is up to Wibsy whether he (or she) wants to bring something of worth to the table or throw things at the wall, hoping something sticks.
AI Has Entered the Chat
I began writing this post back in July 2019. At the time, the earliest versions of GPT models existed, but it would be a few more years before they’d see wide, general use via web-based subscription models.
When it did, Wibsy finally got what he had always wanted: an infinitely patient sycophant who would gladly (and confidently) build whatever was asked without question or complaint!
So why is this a bad thing?
The Illusion of Competency
“Most kinds of power require a substantial sacrifice by whoever wants the power. There is an apprenticeship, a discipline lasting many years. Whatever kind of power you want. President of the company. Black belt in karate. Spiritual guru. Whatever it is you seek, you have to put in the time, the practice, the effort. You must give up a lot to get it. It has to be very important to you. And once you have attained it, it’s your power. It can’t be given away: it resides in you. It is literally the result of your discipline.
Now what is interesting about this process is that, by the time someone has acquired the ability to kill with his bare hands, he has also matured to the point where he won’t use it unwisely. So that kind of power has a built-in control. The discipline of getting the power changes you so that that you won’t abuse it.”
– Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park, 1990
Back in 2023, I was asked to troubleshoot a permission issue in a Microsoft Azure tenant. An Application developer asked GPT-4 to write a PowerShell script to catalog all assets in the tenant, but whenever he ran it, it failed with insufficient permissions.
He insisted he was running the script using his own account, and when I investigated, I found that the role he was granted was “Subscription Owner”. This is the highest permission level a user can have, and it grants them unlimited access to any resource in the tenant.
After reviewing the script, I found that it was creating its own functions and calling built-in functions with invalid parameters, which, as written, would always fail. When this happened, it wrote an error to the console declaring the user lacked sufficient permissions, regardless of why the script actually failed… In other words, it LIED!
Had the developer taken the time to read the script, he might have caught it himself, but instead he threw it over the fence and blindly trusted what it said, wasting everyone’s (mostly my) time. It would not occur to Wibsy to question what he was being told, and even if he could develop the skill to recognize when a mistake was made and ask AI to correct it, he would be in no position to judge the quality of its work…
To be continued in Part II: Wibsy the Slop Herder.
