This is Not a Software Industry - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 7

In many cases, where once games were “engineering bound,” or limited
by the computational power of the systems on which they ran, many game
systems now are “content bound,” or limited by the amount of material
a development studio can pack onto the disk. One creative director of a
game studio alluded to the growing number of artists required to produce
games, where once available engineers to program the game was the pri-
mary limitation.
Artists can now often compromise the majority of a game development
team. Even the classifi cation “artist” becomes further broken down on large
teams. Modellers create 3-D models to be used in the game. Texture artists
create one or many skins that are then applied to these models. Animators
create the skeletal structures (“bones”) that enable a model to be animated.
Procedural or keyframe animations are then created based on the bones
of a model. Lying at the intersection between art teams and engineers is a
relatively new breed of artist, the technical artist, who is often responsible
for creating scripts or utilities that enable art teams to properly export their
work in a way that it can be useful to engineers looking to import those
art assets into the game's engine. Artists will “tag” or mark models, ani-
mations or textures in ways to ensure that designers can reference them
properly from scripts or custom tools.
Game designers are tasked with the construction of what is often obvi-
ously perceived to be the game. Designers construct missions, levels, puzzles
and the overall gameplay. In some cases this occurs in close collaboration
with the team of software engineers working on a game. In other cases,
designers use custom software tools created by specialized tools engineers
to generate text, xml or more generally data fi les that are then interpreted
by the game engine. A tool may catalogue available art assets to ensure
their availability to a designer, but the designer is responsible for construct-
ing the players' experience. Designers will often collaborate with writers
and audio engineers to construct meaningful narratives or shorelines and
accompanying audio experiences for players.
The very notion that games carry with them a kind of “procedural rheto-
ric” or story told through the underlying mechanics of a game above and
beyond those delivered to the player is crucially important (Bogost 2007).
Most software systems attempt to allow the user as much freedom as pos-
sible, providing a framework within which they can work. A game, on the
other hand, constructed by artists and designers for a specifi c platform, car-
ries with it a great deal of rhetorical strength above and beyond the more
obvious narrative of a game. The platform, too, will make certain demands
on the game creators. What can or cannot be done with a given platform
further structures the kind of experience game developers create (Montfort
and Bogost 2009). Whereas a game may tell a visual and aesthetic story,
its underlying rules and systems may tell another story. “Software” is not
interested in providing experiences of this sort.