The analogy with food and cooking always works well: making a game looks like making food, everything is possible, there are some loose rules and an infinity of flavors possible. Like food it’s about chemistry. Like a good salad dressing, it all depends on ingredients and how to mix them. Cooking and making great food is about all that.
The game industry has always been obsessed with hardware. If cooking was treated the way we make games, it would be like:
Or
It would be terrible and not make a lot of sense. And yet, this is exactly how the game industry reacts all the time.
And yet, the market is showing how generic computers –yes, Windows PCs- are all you need, ask Notch, ask Valve and Steam, ask gazillions of developers who ship their games on everything they can. Generic tools as long as they do a correct job are enough to make absolutely divine things or consume those divine things. Gordon Ramsay’s food is still probably amazing in a paper plate.
Chefs don’t obsess over how many burners they have, what brand or how they wouldn’t use that brand. They just cook.
The game industry hardware obsession is connected to machismo, who’s having the biggest one, which in turns correlates the super lack of diversity (dudes dudes dudes). It’s less and less the case but damn, it’s been for so long it’s still a backbone of game culture.
Somehow it’s worse now because young dudes have no idea of what they’re talking about when comparing and “fighting” over which machine is the most powerful, when those machines never have been more equal or barely different. More pointless than ever.
There’s this inextricable conservatism in game culture that really brings us down.
Platforms, tools are just game utensils. Stop obsessing about them, it’s mostly irrelevant today.