The Abstraction Trap
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A lightning talk about abstractions, how they are great, how they are dangerous and how to mitigate the dangers. Delivered at GameDevDays Graz 2019, will be available on YouTube in the future.
The Abstraction Trap
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Editor's Notes
- #2: Welcome 4th time at GDDG 7 minutes, just one idea Inception Visual pun
- #3: Friend worked for local government in my birth city "forester" <- look it up One of his jobs Go places, decide whether there was a forest or not What is a forest? Everyone knows / "feels" a forest Legal definition A lot hangs on this legal definition The concept "forest" is a useful abstraction of a collection of trees
- #4: The closer one looks, the more details appear One may even argue that our understanding of reality is built exclusively on abstractions
- #5: To show how powerful this is… UK: that is the IQ of school children Heterosis: More genetic diversity, less inbreeding
- #6: Why am I talking about this? Game Designers and artists create rules and whole worlds Testers need to find patterns Programmers create interfaces and systems And the trend is going towards abstraction We rely on it more and more
- #7: But there are some downsides I.e. TCP/IP I.e. all Asians are good at math #1 Skill for game designers
- #8: #1 Be aware of the problem! Some hints only… Run thought experiments
- #9: Attributed to Einstein Most likely a paraphrased