Month: September 2025

In game development, I have heard a recurring line from producers and managers:
“You’re not here to learn, you’re here to make games.”

At face value, this may sound like a call for focus and productivity. But in practice, it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the craft. Game development is learning. To deny this is to deny the very process that keeps both people and projects alive.

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The False Divide Between Learning and Making

Game development is not assembly-line work. It is a creative-technical discipline that demands constant adaptation. Every project brings new problems:

• A new console forces a rethink of performance budgets.
• A gameplay mechanic demands physics that feel fun, not just “real.”
• An art direction shift requires new rendering techniques.

To pretend we can “just make games” without learning is to pretend these problems don’t exist. In reality, making and learning are inseparable. We make games by learning, and we learn by making games.

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The Limits of “Knowing”

One of the least smart mindsets is believing you “already know everything.” That belief is not intelligence — it is fragility.

1. The world moves, but you don’t. Engines, hardware, and player expectations evolve constantly. If you stop learning, you fall behind.
2. You shut down curiosity. Without questions, you never discover new approaches.
3. You repeat old mistakes. Assuming you “know it all” means carrying bad patterns from project to project.
4. You block others’ growth. A leader who believes they know it all discourages juniors from asking questions and seniors from innovating.

Knowledge is always partial:

• From school and books: useful, but limited. No textbook prepares you for debugging a live multiplayer desync at 3 a.m.
• From doing: powerful, but also limited. Your experience is only as wide as the projects you’ve touched.

Neither theory nor practice is the “golden egg.” Real growth comes from combining the two, and from admitting there is always more to learn.

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Case Example 1: The Stagnant Studio

At one studio, curiosity was treated as waste. Developers were told to stop asking why and just ship.

• The physics engine ran on outdated code nobody dared to touch.
• Designers were stuck with clumsy tools that slowed them down.
• The same bugs haunted every project because no one was allowed to rethink the system.

The outcome? Every game felt like a reskin. Morale dropped, innovation stalled, and players noticed the sameness.

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Case Example 2: The Learning Culture

In another studio, learning was part of the workflow. Time was set aside for “tech spikes” and experimentation.

When an animator struggled with blending, an engineer researched state machines, prototyped a new system, and shared it across the studio. A small learning exercise became a studio-wide improvement.

The result? Games that felt fresher, stronger systems, and a team motivated by curiosity rather than drained by repetition.

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Learning as a Competitive Advantage

The industry moves fast. Engines deprecate features. Hardware generations change performance budgets. Players expect new experiences.

A team that does not learn falls behind — not in a decade, but in a year. Research supports this: organisations that foster continuous learning are more innovative, adaptive, and resilient (Garvin, Edmondson, & Gino, Harvard Business Review, 2008).

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The Principle

Rejecting learning is not efficiency. It is stagnation.

If you’re not thinking, you’re not evolving. If you’re not evolving, you’re not growing.

Game development demands growth because each game is different. The smartest teams are not the ones that “already know” — they are the ones willing to learn.

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Closing Thought

“You’re not here to learn” belongs to a production-line mentality that does not fit creative industries. In reality, learning is the work. The best games — and the best teams — are those that never stop growing.

When many of us first begin creating—whether in writing, coding, or game design—we are haunted by the pursuit of originality. We fear tropes, clichés, and “borrowed” mechanics, convinced that unless our work is radically new, it lacks value. This is what I call the originality trap: the belief that innovation requires absolute novelty.

Ironically, this obsession often stifles creativity rather than liberating it. Early drafts become incoherent as we avoid familiar structures. Games sprawl into messy experiments as we try to reinvent mechanics wholesale. The result is work that is different but rarely better.

The Shared Building Blocks of Story and Game Design

In literature, Joseph Campbell famously identified recurring patterns across myths in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). The “monomyth” demonstrates that most stories recycle the same archetypes: the call to adventure, the mentor, the ordeal, the return. Yet Star Wars, Harry Potter, and The Odyssey remain distinct because of how these shared elements are arranged.

Games mirror this principle. Mechanics such as resource management, progression systems, and combat loops appear in countless titles. Sid Meier once defined a game as “a series of interesting decisions” (Meier, 2012). What distinguishes Civilization from StarCraft or Age of Empires is not the raw mechanics—many are functionally identical—but the way they are woven into a coherent player experience.

Features vs Narratives

This is where the difference between features and narratives emerges. Features are discrete capabilities: crafting systems, weather effects, skill trees. Narratives are the integrated whole: the way features interact, reinforce each other, and create meaning.

As in writing, where tropes become narrative arcs only when coherently arranged, so in game development features become compelling when unified into a systemic story. Originality is not the invention of new atoms, but the arrangement of existing molecules.

A Universal Analogy

Physics reinforces this lesson. Everything in the observable universe—stars, planets, humans—is built from the same fundamental particles: quarks, electrons, and the forces that bind them (Greene, 2004). The uniqueness of a star versus a human arises not from the invention of new matter, but from the particular arrangement of shared components.

So it is with creative work. Stories borrow tropes, games reuse mechanics, code repurposes structures. Their individuality emerges through coherence, not invention.

Conclusion

Originality is overrated; craft is underrated. By escaping the originality trap, we allow ourselves to focus on the true challenge: weaving familiar pieces into a unity that feels inevitable, complete, and compelling. In writing, coding, and game design alike, how we arrange the parts is what makes a work truly its own.

References

• Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton University Press.
• Greene, B. (2004). The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. Alfred A. Knopf.
• Meier, S. (2012). Sid Meier’s Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games. W. W. Norton.