I dunno, much like how most people aren't artists, I think most people probably wouldn't get a lot out of game programming because they just don't have that combination of creative spark and narcissism to think they can create a great game.

Most of the actual fun in programming is that feeling of ongoing small puzzle solving.

This seems to also be defining game creation in terms of money: a "great game", as if something has to be widely appreciated to be great.

Artists make art because they feel a need to express themselves. There are often less-stressful, more commercial uses for their same talents, but they do art instead, because there's something nagging on their minds to be expressed out into the world. (Often an artist-in-general will learn a new artistic medium just to express a feeling they don't feel can be expressed with their current toolset!)

And nobody ever said the artistic process itself is fun. It's toil for the reward—the satisfaction—of having communicated your thought in a way that seems capable of truly touching other people. Just like the "petty art" of the prose writing we're doing to each-other here — but with much more labor and intent put into each stroke, such that there is more value to be wrung out of each moment of experiencing the result.

> It's toil for the reward—the satisfaction—of having communicated your thought in a way that seems capable of truly touching other people.

The programming community is almost exactly the group of people who believe they can truly touch others by developing practical software. And programmers are usually really bad at truly touching others with artistic games.

Most people are quite bad at expressing themselves, let alone most programmers. I think contributing to open source is probably a greater source of satisfaction for most than programming games. I've had a hopeless stab at both, and making a small meaningful contribution was much more satisfying than expressing myself badly through a game.

> And programmers are usually really bad at truly touching others with artistic games.

I think you missed the key words "seems capable of" in my statement.

Satisfaction in creating art doesn't come from actually touching other people's emotions, i.e. witnessing them being touched. (People who need that feeling, should best avoid becoming artists, and instead become entertainers or performers, where your craft is done "in communication with" a direct audience.)

Satisfaction in art comes from when you've polished your work to the point where your mental model of other people is touched. It's actually completely solipsistic; it doesn't depend on whether any real person ever sees the art at all. Just whether you think your target audience (which can even be a fictional character, or a dead person, etc.) would like it if they ever did see it. (Art can also be entirely for yourself — though works of art of the complexity of games usually aren't.)

As such, you can be truly bad at expressing yourself, and still receive satisfaction from creating art — as long as you're also bad at predicting how other people will react to your art†.

Luckily for fledgling artists, skill in the craft of art, and skill in judging art quality, are usually developed together. So, when starting out, you can be satisfied by bad art, because you don't yet know it's bad. (Though this does mean that people who start out as art critics, have a very hard time of becoming artists, because they know from the start when they have no inborn talent for art, and that discourages them from doing the practice required to develop the skill for art.)

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† It could also be that you're bad at the craft of art, and have a well-calibrated mental model of people, but you're just driven to create art for people with weird/outré/"bad" taste, who are especially moved by exactly your brand of unskilled art. But that's beside the point I'm making here.

> People who need that feeling, should best avoid becoming artists, and instead become entertainers or performers, where your craft is done "in communication with" a direct audience.

Modern games technology allows this. I know many an independent developer in tight community with players. There's this dude who's making this game who emails me closed beta builds and I think he's an artist. He often watches streamers in his community playing his own game and having a laugh with them. It's very personal. He puts his biggest fans into the game as NPCs, it's adorable.

> I think contributing to open source is probably a greater source of satisfaction for most than programming games.

I've never had better satisfaction in games compared to open-source. The focus on iteration making the games trumps any jockeying about over features/correctness/'is this needed' in open source contributions.

What about contributing to an open source game? I have code in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

I'm going to save that in my quotes collection. Beautifully said.

> Most of the actual fun in programming is that feeling of ongoing small puzzle solving.

Not for everyone https://josephg.com/blog/3-tribes/

I had quite a bit of fun many years ago making an Arkanoid clone that included gravity and a tilting paddle that would react to the impact of the ball. Only two people ever played it: my brother and me.

And I’ve lost the source code, but I recall it being very easy to make in Love 2D.

It was fun, at least. And I’m a huge fan of this kind of mass low-grade creativity.

If you still have a binary, LÖVE 2D games are reasonably simple to decompile.

Fascinating fact. Thank you. I have nothing. But it should be easy enough to replicate.

Any amount of hobby projects allow to blend software with whatever your interests are.

Everyone probably has other hobbies that they could easily write software for