Games are data, not Renderers

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Was Quake 3 the same as American McGee's Alice the same as Soldier Of Fortune?

Are Astroneer, Moss, Unravel the same games?

The answer is clearly no, even though each set of these games share roughly the same platform technologies.

The variety of experiences we create from the same technologies are bounded only by tooling and input data. This doesn't ignore the fact that those experiences owe to a renderer. In reality though that we are ultimately trying to achieve by making games is to key into the overall consciousness of the players, meaning their imaginations, possibility space, and thought processes. Something running at a decent framerate with graphical detail is the cherry on top.

Why are so many creators obsessed with underlying technologies? Why has that obsession bled out into the players consciousness?

I'm a victim to this technology first way of thinking. I ultimately want to create and share thematically interesting interactive experiences, though too often I'm crippled by thinking that I need to write library level code to do it. This is a difficult mentality to decouple from.

My feeling is that the article "make games not engines" is outdated. A leap in the right direction to graduate from not invented here thinking, but still it comes from a time before the indie explosion, when tools were still not cheap and CPU's prehistoric by today's standards. It doesn't go far enough in discouraging the reader from writing code.

There are so many complete solutions out there. Their licensing is permissive, their expressive capabilities more than enough to start working right away.

Filling spreadsheets, adjusting text files,  writing scripts (often considered the "lesser" version of coding), using level editors, using plug and play, and switching on the "use physics" flag - that is the craft! Assets and data and simple rules are game creation. Not endlessly rewriting what others have already made.

Maybe this will sink in for me one day in a deeper way. Until then I'm trapped in this fearful thinking that I need to reread Hamilton's extensions of complex numbers and implement quaternions before I can tell the stories I want.

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