A breathless list of about 100 game development questions

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What tools can allow a team of a dozen devs to successfully ship a much larger (more ambitious, higher quality, bigger scope) game than could normally be attributed to a team that size? What about an even smaller team? A half-dozen people? 3-4 people? What does an ideal production plan look like with such small teams and large games? What new strengths surface when an entire production team can sit around a small table or talk through a challenge in a meeting where everyone can participate? If decisions are all able to be made closer to the people implementing the decisions, what does this do to iteration times? If Iterations times can be tightened, can we blur the the lines between traditional production phases? How do we play to the strengths of doing so? How do we mitigate the risks? What are the implications for the type of game that can be created  What about a team with no full-time engineers? Or, generally, if the shift moves from technical competency to creative competency? How does a "writers room" make and ship a game? If we shift away from requiring all the roles traditionally needed in game development, what happens to the games? What do new perspectives start to do to the end result?What does a game look like if it could be fully realized by a team consisting of concept-centric artist, a writer, a designer, a community manager and a QA engineer? What does that do to narrative structure? Player engagement? Community participation? What are the implications of those tools in the hands of a production team of 50-60 people? In what ways does this scale? In what ways does it fail to scale? What does this mean for a full-size studio? High concurrency (many titles in development)? Faster iteration What are the financial implications of this? What does it to do risk taking/aversion? If it means individual titles can be higher risk (creatively), what does that imply creatively for the games being produced? And at what point do we need to acknowledge that maybe even saying "games" starts to carry assumptions that are no longer met? What does it imply financially for those games? What does it do to viable business models? Are there opportunities to explore monetization models that are more long-term sustainable? That positively change the relationship between game developers and gamers? What are the IP implications of high concurrency or faster iteration? Where does this start applying pressure to a studio's structure? What happens to marketing, building a player base, etc. when release schedules start to dwarf production schedules in time and budget? What does this do in a world of early access, live ops and games as a service? If production is fast and highly iterative, do we begin to further blur the lines between pre-release, release, and live games? In terms of expectations about what sort of changes can/should happen when? In terms of team support and staffing throughout? What are the implications for the game as a player experience? As a product? When these start to converge, can we start to take lessons from the realm of monetization / free-to-play and start applying them more generally to the game's design? Taking retention building tools from the realm of monetization and start applying them more broadly to "because we want to craft a better experience.” What are technical considerations of tools like this? What needs to be fundamentally re-imagined? What does actual content authoring look like?What role does AI play in content authoring? Example-based learning in development? How does this change the role of artists, for example shifting from vertex / pixel manipulation to providing vision and curation? In what ways does this reshape roles and responsibilities between disciplines (eg. environment art and level design). What lines get blurred? What lines become more clear? Does this change throughout the scope of a production? How is gameplay orchestrated? Without programming - at all or at least without it becoming a constraint? How can development iteration be brought closer to the play experience and how does this reshape the role of QA and testing? What allows those methodologies to be brought forward to be more a part of the process from day zero? What does this do to the end game? What are the implications for collaboration? How does this change the underlying data, and what are the implications for version control, CI, etc. when functionality is expressed as trained machine learning or graphs instead of code? How does this change the notion of a "project", and in doing so does it change the notion of shared resources across multiple projects? Does this shift to a more ad-hoc notion of a production with authoring and contribution coming from multiple sources? What does that do to structure? And does this allow us to shift to a more ad-hoc notion of a team? Can a production have more people coming and going? Not just over the lifecycle of the production, but on a daily or weekly basis? If we've collapsed production and release schedules, how do design and production tools begin to incorporate live player data in meaningful ways? How does this help us shift to a more player-centric design and production methodology? What does this do to decision-making processes when it is in the hands of the people actually making the game? What are the implications of all of this on the ability to have players co-create content? What does this mean for games that aren't as sandbox-y as something like Minecraft or Roblox? In what ways does this interact with the IP? What risks and opportunities get created? What are the structural implications to a studio? What new business models open up? What new points of stress and failure are created? What is required of tools to create communities and community content? What happens when "virtual event planning" is integrated deeply into the production pipeline? How could a community manager create, for example, unique in-game rewards for players - with unique visual appearances and functionality - without any requirement of engaging with "artists" or "programmers", and how could such content be taken live? And is this fundamentally different than how such content could generally be made? Could an artist say "I'd like to try out this new visual design on a random selection of a hundred players" without it becoming a huge production issue? Could a designer do this with functionality? And then aren't we just talking about iterating the design with players? Isn't this just how a game could be made? How can changes to tools and production workflows help us make "the game as a live experience" a fundamental part of the development from day zero? And even beyond the game as a live experience - If I want to play a game from my childhood, I can install an emulator. How will that work with games as a service? How can our tools help us to craft long-term self-sustainable games and communities? As we blur the lines between a production and live game and between developers and players, the social components of gaming start to bleed into the development of games: What are tools that allow the design of innovative and novel social interactions? Between groups of players? Between players and developers? Between players and content creators? How do those tools integrate deeply with a game's production? How can these tools allow us to blend physical and virtual spaces? Asynchronous and realtime interactions? What does a roadmap for this look like? The timeframe for arriving at many of these answers covers many years. How do we start making a measurable positive impact on productions much earlier than that? This question spawns a million smaller ones because I believe it is impossible to design these tools in a vacuum and that real measurable objectives need to exist along the way so that tools can have an impact on production as quickly as possible. When fundamentally re-imagining tools, how do we get them into the hands of users? How do we "bootstrap" the authoring experience so that development can co-exist with an existing pipeline?