Comment by douche | Hacker News Reader

Comment by douche | Hacker News Reader

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Games, and game modding, seems to be the most accessible and most successful gateway drug to programming. Games that have decent mod support can offer a natural skill progression, without overwhelming all at once. Start by tweaking some data; move on to basic scripting. Eventually, you start to chafe against the limitations of the game's modding abilities, and want to start building your own thing.

This whole process is grounded in something real, and something that is more fun than crunching numbers or building a fake CRUD app.

I'm curious about the spate of games that directly incorporate programming. Maybe they have been more effective than I think, but for the most part, they just aren't really that fun, IMHO. They lean too hard towards the edu, and not enough toward the tainment... Particularly in comparison to, say, building a custom StarCraft map with triggers and conditions or a Quake level, that you can go play with your friends after.

I'll second games being a great gateway drug.

My first introduction to programming was game development. Around early 2007, Bungie ( the game studio that made Halo ) released a bunch of devcasts in which a handful of the developers would all sit around, shoot the shit, and talk about building the game. I naturally thought it was awesome and looked for tutorials on Youtube. Unfortunately I didn't stick with it due to the steep learning curve and decided software development was too hard ( If only I had a mentor/teacher at the time ).

A few years later though my friend and I wanted to bot the game Runescape to make some money. The most ban-proof way at the time was to use this program called Simba and you wrote scripts with a pasacal-like language. Everything was based on the pixel color of something and most of the bots were simple procedural programs. Due to the simple nature of the scripts, you could easily write something without a ton of prerequisite knowledge and see if it worked or not. The biggest problem with this method was color and object detection, how do you know if what you're clicking on is a tree or some grass? At the time, the hotshots in the community were mostly people enrolled in cs programs and building neat algorithms to detect stuff. The only way to compete with them was to learn the fundamentals of cs. so of course that's exactly what I did!

Gaming provides a fantastic playground for learning because it's fun and there are very clear rewards for learning more ( Learn matrix manipulation, get better object detection, make more gold ). I think teachers would do well by getting games into the classroom. They really do open the imagination when paired with programming.

I grew up making starvraft maps and warcraft 3 maps. Allowed me to believe in myself and grow a thick skin

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