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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5664737" data-attributes="member: 54877">Part of my job is nailing down software requirements with users--most of whom have very little understanding of what goes into software.  But the ones with little understanding are often easier to converse with than the ones who know more.  Really, easy is the stuff on the ends--the people that know nothing and the people that know pretty much everything relevant to their problem.  The closer you get to the middle, the tougher it gets. I suspect that game designers relationship with the community is like that.  Moreover, most of are pretty square in the middle between knowing nothing and a lot.  We play games; we tinker with games; we might even write our own.  And of course there are industry people participating here that do more than that.  But even these guys are often agenda-driven by their own preferences--much like the in-house software guru that is going to insist that the project go with his, um, "esoteric" relational database ideas.  Sometimes he might even be right.  He does have a lot of hard-won knowledge of a particular problem space.  But most of the time, there is something major wrong with his idea, even while it contains a key insight.  And most of the time, those users have embedded their legitimate and necessary requirements in a bunch of ... much less legitimate and necessary stuff.  I hope you appreciate my restraint, here. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> Point being, it is hard work to ferret out the useful stuff from the rest, even when you sit around the table with a select group of people for hours at a time.  And in fairness to us, there really isn't much we can do to change this either, even if we were so inclined.  All we can do is honestly state our case and let the people reading it do with it what they will.</blockquote>

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