Creativity isn’t narrowly defined to exclude everything but art, game mechanisms, and narrative.
You think the creation of GMail didn’t take creativity?
I’m suspicious of anyone who tries to lay a special claim to creativity for their class or type of work. Creates a false creative vs cog narrative that always seems to benefit the speaker.
Modern sites are extremely complex. BASH, Docker, Kubernetes, Python, Varnish, NGINX, Postgres, Cassandra, Elastic, Redis, Celery, CSS/Sass, Typescript. Observability, logging, build systems, testing, backups, CI, and a consistent design system. That’s all just to get to HTTP 200 “hello world”.
And these require none of the deep math that the lower levels of gamedev stack require. It's tedious, not hard to string all of these web components.
I'm often doing math when working with ranking (search and otherwise) and throttling/rate-limiting. What about fraud detection and prevention? There isn't an off-the-shelf solution that you can use to build a modern site. It requires hundreds of hours of hard work and an understanding of everything from binary to color theory.
The job of a full-stack developer has a lot of complexity and requires a great deal of creativity. Game dev too.
I'm not sure why my ego would be bruised by anything you said. None of it applies to my work.
What has ranking have to do with the standard website? Or fraud detection/prevention? Clearly these are out of the scope of the standard website. And I highly doubt they require deep math, just some probability, maybe a slight use of matrices.
Given the number of surface level buzzwords you throw out, I think your ego's preventing you from looking deeper.
A lot of fancy keywords, but
1) It's the stack that you decided to put your services on, your HTTP 200 could be also served by nginx + 1 html file
2) You can make empty video multiplayer game which will sound as fancy as that HTTP 200 hello world
Yes! Games are complex! An empty site with modern infrastructure is just as complex as an empty multiplayer video game, exactly, we agree!
However, NGINX+a file isn't going to get you very far. You know that.
My argument is that you can put most good developers into game development and with a little time and experience those devs will find that the work isn't much harder than any other kind of complex development.
Most of the questions in game dev like other forms of development are solved. Building a game is like developing any other kind of complex modern system, integrating disparate solutions into a cohesive whole.
Disclaimer: i've barely ever programmed video games
Not the same kind of creativity, for sure. Gmail has no performance constraints (and its performance is horrible), has no UX constraint (and its UX is horrible). It pushed the free tier some time ago and was arguably a decent webmail at the time, but nothing about it was revolutionary.
The hacks required to get a game to react and push pixels in real time on specific hardware are very interesting. That's closer to proper software engineering than many things we find in startups. That said, more and more games use Unity and other all-in-one engines and are not engineering anymore… and as a player, i can certainly feel the difference in the constant stuttering which mostly was not there when playing console games >10 years ago.
Have you tried doing modern frontend work? Creativity is required.
I played with Claude recently. It wasn’t able to refactor a CSS one liner into simple sass mixin.