Is the "How are NP-Hard problems managed in game development contexts?" question a "good subjective", should it be reopened?

Question

This question has recently been closed as Needs more focus.

Although I agree that the question is not about an exact single real-world problem that a user is currently facing during the development of a game, it is an interesting theoretical one that is related to game development.

In my humble opinion, it does very well fit within the criteria of "good subjective" that we have here.

Should we reopen it?

(You can vote to reopen it 😉)

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A couple of things to note about the close votes:

• two votes were cast before the edit in its current form so maybe the users who cast them would not have cast them with the question in its current form
• three mods commented on the question without feeling the urge to unilaterally close it, so it's presumable "border line"

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I'm raising this here because I'm starting to be concerned about what this site appears to be becoming: a programming site that is specific to game-development tools, which SO can do (and is doing) very well. This question appears to move us away from the "bad" aspects of the site raised last year (We're slowly becoming a Unity Stack Exchange., It's hard to find high-level questions). This is probably a discussion topic to be posted separately here on meta, but welcoming such questions could help keep the community active and healthy. _{(Also, just to make it clear, I'm not trying to help a fellow mod get more internet points.)}

Answer 1

I didn't much care for the original version of the question. Asking for a shopping list of NP hard problem instances isn't particularly deep, i.e. they don't inspire answers that explain "why" and "how". And they may become problematic in terms of maintenance - as new game mechanics (& to a slower extent genres) are invented over time, additional NP hard problems might become 'game dev problems'. As surfaced in the comments, the maintenance aspect is at best a lesser concern.

In contrast, the edited version does inspire "why" and "how" answers. While the question is on the broader side, it has answer that covers pretty much everything I can think of & manages to do so in about a screen's worth of text. I have voted to reopen.

Regarding the concern about GDSE's focus drift - I think that's a valid point. The question in question along with its answer are the sort of thing that will probably still be relevant in spite of the API turn over that's bound to occur over time.