Please don't. I worked on databases, and elitism of gamedev folks often makes me smile.

People there will cheat every way possible to get their framerate/performance/cpy cycles. Yes, it's often amusing to read about really clever and interesting approaches, hacks or even framings of the problem. Like even one of Blow's presentations, where he was explaning how Braid did time reversal. Naive intuition tells: "make everything deterministic", Blow's answer: "how about just tracking state of everything".

But gamedev is not "orders of magnitude complex than any other software". State of the art databases need to be fast and correct. Even that alone makes them far more complex than "state of the art games".

And I'm sure there are many other areas who will look at databases and also rightfully tell that they are even more complex.

[delayed]

> State of the art databases need to be fast and correct

SOTA games need that too. Games need to deal with physics, audio, rendering, networking, anti-cheat etc. at the same time. All very performance sensitive

Do you think Postgres is more 'complex' than a triple A game like GTA 6?

I just can't let this pass... what happens if there is a bug in a game? Nothing of consequence. What happens if there is a bug in a database? Real-world consequences. A rendering glitch or an object behaving oddly in some cases is not a big deal. A database losing a record or computing something incorrectly... BIG F'ING DEAL! I cannot understand how you can even suggest these are equivalent.

> Do you think Postgres is more 'complex' than a triple A game like GTA 6?

Yes, absolutely. The postgres codebase has been around a long time and continues to be changed and accumulate functionality that all needs to work together. Just look at the details in the recent stories about all the issues that were found and the need to slip the schedule.

> And I'm sure there are many other areas who will look at databases and also rightfully tell that they are even more complex.

Robotics! Take all the problems of games and databases and put them on wheels.

> State of the art games are orders of magnitude more complex than any other software

This is an absurd claim that gamedev folk like to tell themselves. Having seen the mess of several engine codebases, incl AAA engines and the memory leaking unoptimized state of many games, I don't think so.

There's many safety critical real time systems that are both more complex and approached with a lot more thorough design. Let's just say I would not trust a Jonathan Blow to put people on the moon.

That's not to say gamedev isn't challenging, but it's not quite as complex as the industry would like to think.

Most games are basically throwaway projects. You write it once, maybe put out a DLC, and then you move on to the next one. There's no incentive to keep the codebase maintainable long term, because there is no long term (unless you're making something like WoW). Games also aren't deterministic by nature, so some glitches and imprecisions won't even register as bugs to players.

I'd argue a database engine is far more complex than a game engine. It has to be 100% reliable, and the codebase needs to be clean enough to stay maintainable for decades.

> State of the art games are orders of magnitude more complex than any other software.

Tell that to the FAA.

I am a professional game developer and Blow doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to AI. He simply doesn't have sufficient experience using AI. And he doesn't have sufficient experience working in a project that is not his own zen garden that he is in total control of.