I hear this a lot, but I personally don't get it. These games are the best part of my job (the problem solving) without any of the nonsense. Most games today are a grindfest that we convince ourselves is fun because it's happening in a beautiful virtual world.

There doesn’t have to be (as much) nonsense on a personal project where you’re only beholden to yourself, can pick your own tech, etc.

(I’m sure people also have less nonsense and make money from it, but I don’t right now.)

Less, but not zero. Personal projects can still suffer from obscure bugs or undocumented behaviour in dependencies, unattainable goals, costs, and other non-bureaucratic frustrations. A significant part of the satisfaction of Factorio for me comes from the knowledge that, if something isn't operating as I expect/hope it to, I can _just look at_ the surface-level representation of the system to diagnose it. This isn't possible in software projects without a huge amount of investment in observability - which is rarely fun or prioritized.

Yes.

The programming game TIS-100 gives you a view of the internal state of the machine far superior to what exists with most systems. The exception being that Commodore 64 emulator that shows _everything_ going on in memory in real time.

More often (in the embedded world) you are debugging things via JTAG and a serial port (if you are lucky) or a GPIO-driven LED (if you are not lucky or this is super-early in the boot process). And often the JTAG is less than 100% reliable.

I absolutely loved playing TIS-100 despite having no clue what a real world counterpart would be. It was really nice understanding the limitations of the system and then trying to be creative to solve problems. I got through 3/4 of the game before I lost my save (on my GoG version). I just re-bought it on steam for the cloud saves. Same thing happened to my ExaPunks save.

The closest real-world thing would be something like The Connection Machine, which combined 64Ki processors in a hypercube. Individually, they had just a small amount of RAM for programs.

Today's GPUs are more about executing the exact same small program in a massively parallel way, and not individually programming each of the compute elements.

You know... it would be a fun project to make a TIS-100 in actual hardware on an FPGA or something. Actually, if you aren't the FPGA type, you could just write an emulator on an 8-bit microcontroller, and connect them all together. Bonus points for having each one with a display that shows its current execution state.

Playing Zelda Breath of the Wild atm and I sort of feel this way. I love riding around the map but I'm getting a bit... tired

Yeah, I enjoy having a definitely-solvable problem with good restraints.

Unfortunately, the latter half of the programming games generally gets too messy for me. I lose patience with them and never end up completing them.

I don't regret buying them, though. I have a lot of fun with them before that.

I don't get it either.

I remember hearing the same thing about the show Silicon Valley. People in the workplace would say things like "OMG I can't even watch that, it's so like our daily lives!" -- is it? Yes we're coders, but is it?

Having said that to each their own :)

I view these games similarly. I don't think anything has helped me in my day-to-day decision making at work more than the time I've spent planning and designing my factory(s) in Satisfactory.

Zachtronics games give you a limited playing field with a limited set of operations. The fun comes from thinking carefully about small problems, and doing a lot with a little.

Factorio is more like work, because they don't know when to stop. There is just too much going on, too much complexity.