When a Coder Plays Games...

I enjoy PC games. At the moment I'm playing Spore and awaiting delivery of Crysis Warhead. I buy between 1 and 3 games a month depending on releases. However, my day-to-day job differs very little from the work of the game developers. How does my knowledge of the internal workings of a game affect the way I experience a game?

We plan new features, build them in stages, spend much time messing with our own creations trying to break them, and when they break we figure out how to fix them. A rally driver can most probably tell you in quite boring detail how the internal structure of a car makes it drive the way it does, but it doesn't really affect the feeling of driving.

Also, like a rally driver, simply knowing how it works doesn't make you any good at it. I'll be first in line to admit that I'm not the best at any particular type of game. Actually I pretty much suck at RTS games. A quick glance at my bookcase tells me that the closest thing to RTS I own would be SimCity 3000 (in my opinion the best of the series) and Startopia, both more disaster management than RTS. Anyway, back to the point.

When I play a game, I approach it the same way I approach everything in life:
"What is my goal? How can I achieve it? Is there a better or simpler way of accomplishing this goal? Is this cheating?"
I don't go looking for every mistake in the game I can, and tell them how to fix it. All this does is deprive me of the pleasure of playing the game. I do notice the mistakes, the little glitch that nobody else noticed or was simply too small to devote time to this close to going gold. Some critics (reviewers?) will name and shame these little glitches like it's the end of the world, but in a world where games become increasingly complex and detailed, is it really possible to cover for every possibility? I think it's wrong to even expect developers to perform such feats. If anything, the fact that I understand the work that goes into a game makes me more lenient to the mistakes or oversights in games.

I heard a very nice analogy in a podcast today, either 1UP Yours or the last GFW Radio, not sure. Allow me to paraphrase it a bit. When a programmer plays a computer game it's like pulling the curtain away from a magic show to expose all the gears and pullies and tricks underneath. But the question is, now that you understand how the trick works, does it make the trick any less impressive?

I don't think so...

Words:
"We are united by a common element. Its not the color of our skin or our ideology or where we come from. No it's that we're a giant bunch of fucking nerds."
-Ken Levine, PAX 2008 Keynote(video)