Abstract
Problem: Why do game studios lose the ability to make games that "feel right" over time, and why do sequels or new entries sometimes feel fundamentally different from what fans expect?
Approach: Tim Cain defines institutional knowledge — the unwritten things you're expected to know at a company — and examines why it goes undocumented and what happens when it's lost.
Findings: Institutional knowledge fails to get written down for four key reasons: everyone already knows it, it seems obvious, some people hoard it for job security, and some of it is genuinely impossible to verbalize. When studios lose this knowledge through layoffs, retirements, or natural turnover, their games lose the ineffable "feel" that defined them.
Key insight: The distinctive feel of a studio's games lives not in documentation but in the heads of the people who make them — and when those people leave, the feel leaves with them.
Definition and Distinction
Tim Cain defines institutional knowledge as things you're expected to know when you work at a particular company and on particular projects, but that aren't written down. He notes this is sometimes called "tribal knowledge" but prefers the term institutional knowledge.
He distinguishes this clearly from game preservation — this isn't about saving old games, it's about the unwritten knowledge that makes current games what they are.
Why Institutional Knowledge Goes Undocumented
Everybody already knows it
The biggest reason: when everyone at a company shares the same knowledge, writing it down feels as pointless as reminding someone the sun is yellow. "This is how we do things. This is the kind of games we make. They tend to have this tone. We tend to treat dialogue this way." It's so embedded that it seems unnecessary to document.
It seems obvious
Closely related — some knowledge is so foundational to the people working there that they don't even realize others might not know it. Tim gives his own YouTube channel as an example: he'd casually use industry terms like "vertical slice" or "prototype" without realizing his audience wasn't familiar with them, because these concepts were so deeply embedded in his brain they felt obvious.
People hoard it for job security
This is what Tim calls "a really bad one." Some people treat institutional knowledge as personal property — their value to the company depends on being the only one who knows certain things. Tim encountered this extensively at Interplay while working on GNAL (his General Non-platform-specific Adaptable Library). Programmers had their own private routines for common tasks like blitting pixels or reading mouse coordinates, and refused to share them.
When Tim built GNAL as a shared library, a colleague questioned why he'd give away his "tool chest." Tim's response: "Because we're trying to make games. I'm not trying to be the best programmer here." He observed that some people's personal self-worth mattered more to them than the game — they'd rather make a bad game as long as their individual contribution looked good on a resume.
It's hard or impossible to verbalize
Some institutional knowledge is genuinely ineffable — an unwriteable quality of the games being made that you recognize but can't articulate. This is often about tone: the humor, the style, the feel that makes a studio's games distinctive. Tim connects this to why game directors are so important — sometimes you just need someone who can make a judgment call about whether a feature, a line of dialogue, or a creature "belongs" in the game.
What Institutional Knowledge Looks Like
Tim identifies two main categories:
Processes
The workflows for how things get made and finished. These can be extremely complex — involving multiple specialists (modelers, riggers, texture artists, animators), branching decision points, optional steps, and even external parties like console certification boards. Processes often go partially documented: someone writes down a hundred things but misses one, or documents the branches but not the criteria for choosing between them.
Tone and feel
The ineffable quality that makes a studio's games feel like their games. This encompasses art style, UI conventions, mechanical expectations, humor, dialogue approach, and thematic sensibilities. Players grow to expect a particular feel from a studio, and when a game deviates, they notice — even if they can't pinpoint exactly what changed.
The Consequences of Loss
When institutional knowledge is lost, games from a studio start feeling different — different style, different humor, different tone. Tim identifies three factors driving this loss in the current industry:
- Mass layoffs — widespread in recent years, removing experienced people who carry institutional knowledge
- Retirements — a new phenomenon for the game industry, as veterans of the early era age out
- Natural turnover — people moving between companies for better fit, better pay, or different locations
The result: fans play a new entry in a series or a new game from a familiar studio and feel that "something's off." Sometimes it's a single missing feature they'd grown to expect. At scale, it manifests as a fundamental shift in what the studio produces. Tim argues this explains much of the current player dissatisfaction with sequels and studio output — the knowledge and people that created the games they loved are simply no longer there.
References
- Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0EbiVIfHCw