Eh, the actual number of interactive items in a modern game is significantly less than thousands. Probably more like a few dozen when all is said and done.

You've missed my point entirely.

Games (generally speaking) do not involve allowing the user to interact in arbitrary user-defined ways with every object represented on the screen. The interactions that do happen are part of the physics engine not the "user clicked that and dragged it to the left" engine.

No I think klabb3 has the right of it. They're really not that different and it does just boil down to priority and what is fine to be outsourced to a huge stack of slow libraries and what is prioritized as a core competency.

Yeah, go check out some Factorio screenshots. Thousands of interactive objects animating on screen at once. Not only that, there is a complex sim running in the background. On my machine it runs well past 100fps.

Or 2d strategy games. Which had very decent number of animated units each with their own actions and which you could click and select...

It took the devs years to optimize it to that point though. And I'm quite sure that a screen full of trees or smoke emitting entities (thankfully you can turn smoke/steam off in settings) still makes it go below 60fps on my laptop.

Optimize, yes. But then... It's doing several (hundreds) of orders of magnitudes more than a typical app.

Several hundreds of orders of magnitude more? That doesn't sound possible.

That was an exaggeration but only slightly I guess :)

Considering how many objects and interactions Factorio tracks and at the same time lets you move around, inspect any of those things etc.

A typical app on the other hand does a CRUD operation every once in a blue moon.

This is nonsense. First, no one can interact in "arbitrary user-defined ways" with anything. Second, anything you can imagine on the web and more has already been done in games. Please don't tell people that running a 3d strategy game or a AAA multiplayer first-person shooter is somehow less complex than scrolling an effing window with a bunch of text and forms in it.

> Games (generally speaking) do not involve allowing the user to interact in arbitrary user-defined ways with every object represented on the screen.

Ah yes, and which apps actually allow you interaction in arbitrary user defined ways?

IIUC, in a game, let's suppose you pick up an object. We'll ignore the fact that you probably provide some sort of fairly broad movement to indicate that you want to pick it up - the game just notices this, and your on-screen avatar takes care of the rest. But now that you have it in your hand, you do not actually have control over in a direct sense. You may indicate that you want to lift your arm - all fine, but that information will be fed into a physics engine that will work on actual speed & trajectory, obstacles and collisions etc. What is shown on screen is not the result of you dragging a GUI object across the screen, but the indirect result of your indicating "lift my right arm" etc.

By contrast, most design/creation applications give you the ability to point with the mouse (or touchpad or whatever) at some object on the screen and then move it (sometimes along 3 axes). The speed of the motion, the axial extents and the destination come (at least initially) from you. This is true of drawing applications, design applications, DAWs and lots more.