Week 1.09: Reflection — Communities of Practice

Having run a small business for almost 8 years I can fully understand and appreciate how important communities of practice are for Indie Game Studios. It came as no surprise therefore that this topic featured in our very first module.

In the past I’ve found external communities, whether they be on-line or off-line to be invaluable. I’ve used them to find creatives to work with, to gain and share knowledge and to generate revenue. These same benefits are also equally applicable and vital to Indie Game Development, perhaps even more so.

As game complexity increases to meet the demands of the market, the evolution of new technology and introduction of new techniques game development is moving beyond the reach of the lone wolf developer: “As isolated individuals, it is challenging for indie game developers to gather sufficient knowledge, information, and resources to turn creative ideas into sophisticated technological products” . As the Internet and Social Media have evolved it has now become much easier and far more likely for individuals to find one another, come together and collaborate as a multi-disciplinary team. Working in this way and creating from a shared vision or passion the team has a much greater chance of success .

It’s not just about teaming and collaboration though. Many formal and informal communities exist as a medium to share and acquire knowledge. I myself was very active on one a while back with my top post being shared over 8,000 times.

Viewing such sites from the perspective of commercial software development I’ve always urged my engineers to treat the answers with caution, primarily because there is no guarantee of the skill or expertise of the person providing the answer. The reputation system on sites such as Stack Overflow can be useful but I’ve seen some terrible answers in the past containing unsafe, insecure or erroneous code. Indeed in their 2018 study, Zhang et al. checked nearly 220,000 posts on Stack Overflow, 31% were found to contain a potential misuse of API and of those 76% could potentially have lead to a program crash .

BUT they do provide an invaluable service/knowledge base. My thoughts on their use are to treat any answers as a reference from which to derive my/our own solution to the problem. With this approach I/we would hopefully also be better protected if the question of IP infringement ever arose. That said I would not like to test that theory and would suggest anyone who finds themselves in this situation seek proper legal counsel.

Conclusion

Development communities have gained significant traction in recent years and are likely to withstand the test of time. They provide a means by which small creative teams, even singleton developers, can develop and publish a viable offering. Maybe it won’t compete with the AAA rated titles of the mainstream studios but do they have to? An indie team is never going to have the seemingly infinite resource and bottomless bank account of the industry giants, but do they need it? A team fuelled by creative passion and an unquenched thirst to succeed can achieve great things. One just has to look at the race to achieve powered flight between the Wright Brothers and Samual Pierpont Langley and we all know what happened there…

References

Photo by Faye Cornish on Unsplash