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Got it, so the waiter and dishwasher are Chefs because they work in food preparation
Got it, so the waiter and dishwasher are Chefs because they work in food preparation
If this is the argument, then no person who works in game development is a dev, because I've never actually seen a job title in the industry listed as 'developer'. If it exists, it's rare and maybe one company is doing it.
A programmer is going to have the job title 'gameplay programmer' or 'engine programmer' or 'tools programmer'. Even the umbrella these jobs fit under is tech generally, not 'developers.'
Which, if you feel that way that's fair, but I think you're arguing for the erasure of the term, not its use as a label.
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I think everyone on the team would be 100% OK with calling her a dev.
As someone who worked alongside her, she was an incredibly valuable member, and I'm really not sure what metric you'd judge this by which she wouldn't fit. Even if we're limiting dev to people who've been inside the engine and made changes in engine that eventually made it to the live build - KD fits that.
A lot of us here have worn many hats, and what a QA actually does honestly changes company to company. There are QA Analysts that are very heavily involved/integrated into development processes, and there are QA analysts that are contracted or working in a QA farm completely separate from a Dev team. There are QA engineers that are creating their own automation to integrate into the process, there's people who are heavily specialized in manual tests. I just don't think you can make a blanket claim of 'QA aren't devs' anymore.
Though there's definitely companies where yes, the QA team is very distinct from the dev team.
In my experience, developer has always been synonymous with programmer - but yes, the term probably shouldn't exist because it's vague and misleading.
I think it's disingenuous to say that you're a game dev while not being a programmer. The term 'dev' implies programming, it's always been that way. To me, the terms are essentially interchangeable.
While I recognize that QA is tremendously important in the development cycle, they aren't developers, they're in QA. Job titles exist for this reason - to distinguish who is responsible for what during the development process. If everyone is a game dev, nobody is a game dev.
But yes, the term is too vague at this point and it's essentially lost all meaning anyway. If there are no bounds on what constitutes a game developer, the term is essentially worthless.
I don't think it would be accurate to call a voice actor a game developer, despite them 'developing game content' technically.
I'm going to ask around at work tomorrow and get more opinions from other programmers - I'm curious as to what they think falls within the 'game dev' umbrella.
For what it's worth - I DO think if I was working in the software field I'd probably have a different idea. Because often you'll see people saying they're a software dev - and that really can mean they might fit into a couple different roles into the team, but mostly on the programming side.
Generally in game dev, my experience has been that people IN game dev don't use "game dev" as a title. A designer's going to call themselves a designer. A programmer's going to call themselves a programmer. But they'll be fine telling someone they're a game dev casually. And it has a lot to do with how the audience defines it too. I think most people see Kojima or Cory Barlog as "Game Devs" but in reality that's a designer and EP/Designer/CEO.
But even in the software field it also becomes blurry when you're talking about a QA Automation engineer. Perhaps they're not STRICTLY a dev on a product, but a senior is likely to have a decent chunk of programming knowledge, and could actually probably flex into a prog role, so should they be unable to call themselves a dev when presenting themselves to another job? And to be honest, I have no idea what I'd say as an answer there.