Me, yesterday, during a lengthy Twitter discussion with Jason Schreier. Said because I am occasionally a bull-headed idiot. Whoops!

Jason and I butted heads yesterday over the whole “pre-alpha” thing. He asserted that there was no way I could possibly know which build of Skyrim the press had been invited to play, and I asserted that he was 100% correct.

I also claimed that given what “pre-alpha” actually means, inviting the press to play “pre-alpha code” would be like sending an astronaut to fly a space shuttle that hadn’t been built yet. Jason countered that there isn’t an industry-wide definition of what “pre-alpha” means, that I was wrong, and that I owed Brian Crecente an apology for not recognizing the term to mean what I thought it meant.

This all culminated in Jason challenging me to prove that my definition of “pre-alpha” was the “industry definition”. I made some calls and sent some emails to some programming buddies in the industry while Jason asked the Twitters.

Our separate lines of inquiry yielded more or less identical results - several people gave us several different definitions.

While some of my contacts agreed with my definition of the term, some informed me that “pre-alpha code” could mean code that had been inserted into an alpha or beta build of a game to serve as a “proof of concept” of a feature intended to be included with the release candidate of the game, included for the benefit of the press.

Another contact, a good friend whose job has literally involved tracking the development cycle of games at several studios over the last few years, stated that most of the studios that he’d worked at don’t use the term “pre-alpha” internally at all - anything before the first early builds of a game is designated as Pre-Production.

So my assertion that there is a standard use of “pre-alpha” within the games industry is, it seems, absolute bollocks. While this may be the case for programming in a more general case, the development cycle for the games industry seems to disagree.

I’d like to apologize to Brian Crecente for inferring that, as someone who has worked within the industry for several years, he should have been skeptical of the use of the term, and I’d also like to apologize to Jason Schreier last night for being an insufferable prat.

I’m still of the mind that, irrespective of how it’s used within studios, PR reps are using the term incorrectly to brush off concerns raised about glitches, but it’s perhaps best I let it go for now. I can readdress it later over on the Off-Topic blog.