Has anyone else lost interest in games after learning how they are made?

Knowing that games are written with code made games increasingly more impressive and magical to me, dude.

We're all just code, bro.

You better not try to know how books / movies / TV shows are made then.

Wait what

It's only made them more interesting to me.

Nobody tell him how babies are made.

Everything you perceive is just electrical signals in your brain.

There is no spoon.

All of the first 4 responses jumped into my head after reading the OP - knowing how things are made makes them more interesting to me, not less.

I thought this thread was going to be about bad working conditions/crunch.

But anyways, the more I learn about how games are made, the more I am impressed. So it's the opposite actually.

Not in the least. Knowing how games work is infinitely fascinating, more so than playing games themselves.

Not at all, if anything it's made me be more patient in regards to bugs. What has turned me off are the stories in regards to employees being treated like dirt or laid off immediately after a project's done. Things like that.

is this thread by the Westworld writers room?

Let me tell you about how movies are made to......

Knowing how my stuff is made is so much more enjoyable than not knowing. It's made games, computers (and computer-esque devices, like smartphones), food, and movies all so much more enjoyable.

Bjones said:

Let me tell you about how movies are made to......

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I work in a video game company.... And nope, not at all lol

That is all art my friend

ALL of it

When you're playing a game you're playing with the developer, never really by yourself

Making games out of code might as well be magic to me. How we get something like Dark Souls out of a bunch of text is straight up wizardry.

Thinking about computer programming is so foreign to me. Like it gives me the heebie jeebies knowing people know how to do all that C++ javascript or whatever stuff. All that computer jargon is lost on me. I can't believe there's millions of people who know how to program in the world. I'd never have the patience for that.

Once I learned how hotdogs are made and all the icky things that go into them, so those got 86'd for life.

I think that's the only time this ever happened to me.

Did you lose interest in smartphones as well? I'm just curious. Without coding smartphones are nothing but recyclable material. Games without coding are...wait, there's no games lol

Coding is dominating the world, deal with it.

This is an odd statement. Knowing how games are made just makes me even more excited, especially with more complex games.

Wierd. It's not like it's sausage.

Code is magic. Coding is creating something out of thin air, bending data to your will. Efficient code is art and I never get tired of the challenge.

Videogames made me interested in computers and learning to program. I have never heard the opposite, until today.

It only made them more interesting to me, especially after learning how to code. When playing the first Dark Souls again, I started looking for stuff that show just how well that game was made. Planning a world so intricate, with so many options that work well, and allow players to still find new ways to play after so many years go way beyond coding.

Also, learning how hard it is to even make a simple static model in 3D made me respect big developers like Ubisoft and Naughty Dog way more. Like, you people must plan your games like crazy, and have a very cohesive team to make everything work so smoothly. I don't even mind most glitches nowadays.

And it's even great to see simple indie games. This is one of my favorite RPGs on Linux, Ardentryst:



Its source code is on GitHub as well. I can read the entirety of it, as well as play, and they are entertaining for widely different reasons.

ZangBa said:

Making games out of code might as well be magic to me. How we get something like Dark Souls out of a bunch of text is straight up wizardry.

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It's not really a bunch of text. It's electrical currents at the lowest level. The text is merely a mnemonic device, a shorthand way to express lots of electrical signals. Bits, for example, are understood to be electrical currents running through a circuit. Electrical current is present = 1 = on, electrical current not present = 0 = off. Commands, text, data, everything in computing is really nothing more than a series of light switches being flipped on and off.

Perhaps this video will make the absolute basics of computing more understandable, and thus more interesting:



This is the most fundamental part of any computer, a half-adder (and later in the video, he builds a full 8-bit adder from a series of half-adders). Literally what those dominoes are doing in that video, is the basics of all computing.

This is the mind blowing things about computers -- they are physical machines. Deep, deep down, it's really not all that different from a clockwork mechanism. The secret to computing, is that we have essentially figured out how to shrink things to microscopic levels and can do all the physical moves lightining fast.

anything that provides a constant forward driving motion can be, essentially, a computer. That's how clocks work, that's how people can make things like calculators in minecraft (because minecraft has a type of "stone" that physically moves a current forward called a redstone). You can build computers out of rivers, or hand cranks, or anything that moves. So long as there is an uncontrolled forward force, you can build a computer.

Knowing how they're made has made me appreciate the great games we have even more. Truly amazing stuff people have created.

Cybersai said:

Thinking about computer programming is so foreign to me. Like it gives me the heebie jeebies knowing people know how to do all that C++ javascript or whatever stuff. All that computer jargon is lost on me. I can't believe there's millions of people who know how to program in the world. I'd never have the patience for that.

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I'm just a student, but apparently industry borrows code from other that are already proven to exist. Kind of like how we do integral and derivatives in calculus sometimes without proving the rule a billion of times.

Only a little bit.

I can relate to your feelings of having been in awe of the infinite feeling nature of games, then having that taken away from me as I aged and the realities of the limits of scope of any game's content became more aware to me.

But my personal solution is just to lean towards big games with lots of freedom (open world titles like Skyrim or BotW) or games with lots of randomness/procedural elements in the design to try and recapture the childlike wonder/immersion of feeling like I'm inhabiting a world and not a series of 3D environment maps/levels with invisible walls and nothing outside the play area.

However as many have said, it has given me a new feeling of interest and respect in how the games I enjoy came to be, and the people behind them, especially classic titles that took a great effort and use of clever tricks to achieve things we take for granted now, and small team independent or older titles where you if you know about who made it you can feel a connection to who they were as people at the time.

Gained a deep respect and appreciation that's for sure.

Still love playing them and watching the medium continue to evolve.

FarisR said:

I thought this thread was going to be about bad working conditions/crunch.

But anyways, the more I learn about how games are made, the more I am impressed. So it's the opposite actually.

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Same here.

In terms of what OP is actually talking about, I'm also in the camp where knowing it's code makes it more interesting, especially in comparing the two relatively simple games of my youth to the AAA blockbusters we get today. The wizardry never ends.

love is just chemicals in the brain

Games? Not for a second
Getting into the Industry? That's another story.

I'm in Computer Science.

I only dislike it when the game is so slapped together I can't help but tell how each piece of it was put together.

Usually it's the case of really simple mechanics, and/or a lot of poorly placed prefab objects and/or poorly conceived 2D art design, etc etc. That ruins my lowest level of suspension of disbelief - that any of the developers cared at all.

Pretty rare, overall.

Like sausage? No.

I lost interest in wanting to make games but I find them even more fascinating now that I know more about the process.

You must loathe movies, then.

For me it's less "how it's made" and more "oh, it's this kind of game." I've just played so many games at this point in my life that there's not really a lot of new mechanics and gameplay out there to see. It's why I usually try to find a decent story and good writing.

No, after watching the documentary of Broken Age and other 2playerproduction, I love even more that.

I lost touch with that childhood sense of awe and wonder, but it was just because the way I saw the world gradually changed as I grew up, not because I learned how games/movies/etc were made.

(The occasional pieces of media that do manage to recapture that feeling are very, very special.)

BouncyFrag said:

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People don't actually believe this do they?

* one Google later *

Shit ...

You don't want to know how sausages are made TS.

Relevant:

LOL imagine making them

No, not at all in fact I can't get enough about game history and information about the people who created them.

Why? lol Do you plan to not have relationships or love because it's everything in electric signals? Such strange question haha

Lost interest? Well, no, but there's a certain innocence lost that comes with learning more information about development.

For example, I look back so amusingly on spending months, almost YEARS scouring Ocarina of Time with friends convinced the Triforce was hidden somewhere in the game as a power up, and definitely involved something so convoluted as bombing a rock, running backwards and back flipping into a Skulltula hole. Now I'm too aware of the realities of game design/development and budgeting to think something with that kind of impact on gameplay would be relegated to the most obscure tricks to find.

So some of that magical naivete is gone (some could loosely define that as a kind of 'interest'). but it's not like I've pondered giving up the hobby over it or anything like that.

I get what OP is saying.

Basically, so long as you don't think too hard about it, you can trick yourself into feeling like you're exploring a world that you're only getting to see a small slice of.

Learning about coding is interesting, but it also makes games more "limiting". You find things because someone put it there and designed the world so that players would find it, not because you "discovered" something.

you're serving JRPG villain

and I love it

I cannot help but wonder where you thought games came from before you realised they were designed and programmed?