If you have even the slightest interest in peering behind the curtain into the world of game design, I cannot possibly recommend /noclip enough. No, not the console command, the documentary team covering the triumphs and pitfalls and huge feats of coordination that go into bringing any project home.
While their extensive coverage of watershed moments like Half-Life and Disco Elysium is worth watching, but I'd direct you to their most recent project instead, focusing on now fairly obscure defunct MMO Star Wars Galaxies and the question that ultimately led to its downfall.
From the start, Galaxies was planned to be more of an immersive sandbox than your typical MMO, allowing players to truly carve out a life in a galaxy far, far away. The entire dev cycle was haunted by one inescapable question, though, hanging over the team like a sword of Damocles: what the hell do we do about the Jedi?
On the one hand, it's a Star Wars game, and players will feel ripped off if they don't get to hold a lightsaber. On the other hand, it's an immersive sandbox driven by player interaction, and having everyone be a Jedi would be disastrous for the game's balance and economy.
Entirely separately, Jedi characters would obviously stomp literally everyone else, so how do you regulate that as well? The game's original designer, Raph Koster, sat down with /noclip to discuss the essential problem and its contribution to the game's eventual shuttering. It's immensely fascinating, even if you're just a Star Wars nerd.
Although Galaxies is little-known in general nowadays, the impossibility of "the Jedi problem" — and the clash between ambition and mechanical realities it represents — is still immediately recognizable shorthand among game designers. You never want to hear "we need a Jedi by Christmas."
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