Why don't most CS academics make novel video games?

A totally different kind of creativity is involved.

Frankly, people get ahead in CS by writing papers. Many people who are successful in academic CS aren’t that interested in writing programs or even that good at it.

Video games require interdisciplinary talent. The credits for a video game look like the credits for a movie because it takes 2-d and 3-d artists, character designers, writers, musicians, sound effect specialists, voice talent, and various specialized programmers.

Sure there is the occasional legendary developer who makes something like Touhou on their own but that’s deeply unusual. If a person is dedicated to success on the CS track they might not find it helps them get a postdoc or faculty position or tenure.

I know most of the comments here are already and will continue to be along the lines of "they're two different things requiring two different skill sets", which I agree with.

But my first breakout indie game[0] was directly inspired by my Introduction To Computation course I took in my first year of CompSci at the University of Sussex. The lecturer (who was fantastic, though I forget his name 10 years on) walked us through Finite State Automata, and part of the course homework was, with pen and paper, designing finite state automata that would 'consume' strings of tokens. All pretty abstract, but drawing these circles for the state nodes and directional lines to consume the tokens, all terminating at the right end state... was really fun! They were good, solid, old-fashioned puzzles, just as much as Sodoku or something like that.

I made a mental note that it might make a good video game, and four/five years later I published The Cat Machine on Steam. All it is is those same finite-state automata puzzles, wrapped in a very cat-heavy abstraction. Different coloured cats are the different tokens, the 'islands' are the states, and as the player you draw train tracks between them all to consume x number of cat-train sequences. At the end the cats all sing a congratulatory meow song.

I'm pretty sure everyone just thinks its a whimsical, coloruful puzzle game but I've tricked thousands of people into doing a large chunk of 'Intro To Computer Science' homework without ever realising it!

I think there's plenty of room in CompSci for a dozen more puzzle games that quite directly lift the outline of puzzles out of a textbook and into a more accessible computer game space. I know I've for sure got a few more ideas - one day I'll sit down and make The Cat Machine 2 and incorporate them into a consumer friendly product.

[0] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/386900/The_Cat_Machine/

This is like asking why talented video game programmers dont do more to advance compiler optimization since they re so good.

I suppose some people think software goes beyond entertaining video games.

I often see gamers with the mistaken impression that everybody else is either a gamer or hasn't discovered the right games yet.

To me video games are fun, but they require focus and dedication that I'd rather use elsewhere.

Why doesn't everybody talented enough with their feet to play soccer learn ballet?

Because not everybody cares about video games or ballet.

I got into computer science by making video games for the first couple generations of the iPhone; now I’m a phd student writing papers. Things were fun and simple back then and my games were quite successful. There was something so magical about it. However, the magic was that people were actually playing my games and I could focus on making the game rather than dealing with all the crud that one has to do to ship an app now. While I still get the urge to make a mobile game sometimes, there is little real life “reward” in it beyond making something beautiful and maybe showing it off to a couple friends. Gaining visibility on the AppStore is next to impossible without turning it into a full time job (which was never my end goal). I think if there was even a small but non negligible chance that say 50k people would download and play my game (as I had with some of my old games) I would get the motivation to turn some of my ideas into reality. However, the way things are now, I would be lucky to get 1000 downloads and that would require me developing for all the different interfaces, versions, etc. making it really difficult to focus on “just the game.”

1.) It is actually not fun to create games for quite a lot of people.

2.) Being good in cs does not imply being good in art and making games is 80% art.

3.) Academia is super competitive, so you pick hobbies.

4.) There are more fun things to do.

Why do you assume it's even interesting to them at all?

I make small games as a hobby, but I absolutely wouldn't want to work in game development professionally (I only ever did some light contract work before moving on to another field). I treat making my own games as artistic expression, just like recording songs or painting images - not everyone does these things, do they? Seems like it's just a particular kind of people. That said, I got hooked on initially only because writing my own game framework seemed interesting technically - and now that I have a technical base for my games mostly figured out I wouldn't want to do it again; there are much more interesting things in IT that I haven't explored yet or that need much more love and can actually make a bigger impact, so games stay as my artistic hobby that's mostly limited to game jams and I like it this way.

Novel in what way: mechanics, story, graphics? Only the last of those has real overlap with what CS academics are interested in and if you look at what gets published at siggraph you will see a lot of the researchers are affiliated with game studios or places like Disney or Pixar. So it's not incompatible.

But for the vast majority of CS there is no real overlap with games. Plus if you've spent your career on compilers, or databases, or machine learning or whatever, you know how to build those sort of things very well, but you are going to start over basically from scratch when it comes to developing games.

People capable of building novel videogames are way rarer than people capable of doing CS research. CS research is just a job. You can suck at it and still achieve something.

Novel videogames are rare. I can count novel videogames with my hands.

They probably require development skills, luck, some unique set of experiences, lateral thinking and tons of willpower.

Maybe you could elaborate a bit on your assumptions, and ask a more specific question? Why do you think the urge to make video games would be irresistible? Are you thinking about the goal of using games in research, or thinking of how much fun you have playing games? Do you feel like games are the best vehicle for research, or are you asking whether games are more fun to make than surveys or user studies?

Having been a professional game developer and an occasional academic researcher, I can safely say that game dev isn’t always fun, and wouldn’t always be a good idea for research. There are kinds of CS research that aren’t applicable to video games. There are people who don’t necessarily enjoy video games. There are ways to have fun and make money outside of games. Games take much longer to create than some kinds of user studies. I think there are a lot of reasons…

The games that we create may not appear to be "games" to others, and certainly not enough fun to bother with.

i had an immense amount of fun coding and playing with a "gravity simulation" thing that was as much an exploration of visualizing floating point noise as it was of Xlib and the physics simulation. I severely doubt anyone else would care about 90% of it; it did animate some pretty pictures given the right parameters.

Ask rather "what software do you enjoy as a toy?" and you may find the creativity you expect.

Actually creating a playable interesting game is not related to computer sciences. Creating a video game thats worth playing only references the hardware in terms of "what limits do we need to work around / what capabilities can we exploit".

Dr Mark Johnson with Ultima Ratio Regum comes to mind: https://www.markrjohnsongames.com/games/ultima-ratio-regum/

Academics do make and play games. But being novel doesn't mean they'll be fun or accessible for a general audience. And there's a lot of work that goes into a video game beyond just thinking one up: game engines, making art assets, packaging and distribution. That work isn't necessarily going to appeal to the same people.

Just look at Miegakure for an example of how long it can take to go from an idea to a fun, polished game.

Academics do make novel games! The 'walking simulator' genre and the 'idle clicker' genre were both spawned in academia. However they weren't made by those in the computer sciences, but the humanities. Coding is no longer a barrier to making games and the more fertile ground is currently in the humanities.

On top of what was said already in this thread, I think there is some opportunity these days in applying AI / ML to certain elements of video games, for example writing. It would be difficult to call it wholly novel video games, though.

Why would I do that?

What kind of undertaking do you mean, going to work on commercial games or hobbyist game jam style games?

Commercial games tend to be pretty calculating, and audiences are used to this, there novel game types are risky and rare.

No time, frankly to make a game you need a good idea an implementation skills unless someone is in the field of graphics or some very specific case there is simply no good reason to invest time to do it.

"Grandpa, are you saying that all you did was make video games, where you could have been writing really interesting software for medicine or research? What a waste!"

They are fundamentally different types of people.

Why don't the best motorcycle mechanics make novel airplane designs?

Those who can’t, teach.