> Stupid decision-making is why I will never work in games. With regular coding, you can iterate towards the domain and so long as you keep your wits about you and never make the same mistake twice, never be subjected to such a demand.
In the ideal environment, perhaps; all too often in real environments, radical shifts in requirements not discoverable by advance consideration of the domain can happen outside of games (sometimes, because there are radical shifts in the domain -- if your system is automating implementation of corporate or government policy, whims of policymakers can change things as radically as "the player is now a car").
I work for a marketing company, I'm well aware of shifting whims. You can build flexibility into your infrastructure if you really need it. You come up with a model for how things are likely to change in the future and work modularity into your codebase.
This approach doesn't really work for games. Everything is so interdependent, modularity that allows for all possible ways for the system could change would slow it down to a crawl. There's just no way to avoid expensive, painful rewrites.
This is somewhat true, but you structure the code in a way so that rewriting any one part is easy. You keep your modules fairly large, your abstractions thin, and the code very literal. It's much easier to do a total rewrite on code that's like this than when you abstract it out a great deal.
It's very quick to write code like this, and the maintenance cost of this isn't as large as you might think (honestly, after you get used to it, you often end up preferring it. It's very, uh, blunt, for lack of a better term).
Edit: Worth noting that these rewrites aren't always due to a change in creative direction. There are often ones for technical reasons.
In the ideal environment, perhaps; all too often in real environments, radical shifts in requirements not discoverable by advance consideration of the domain can happen outside of games (sometimes, because there are radical shifts in the domain -- if your system is automating implementation of corporate or government policy, whims of policymakers can change things as radically as "the player is now a car").