You could say the exact same thing about books, TV, movies, paintings, etc.
Games are just like any other form media. Yes, many of them are superficial, but a lot of them tell incredible stories, teach life lessons, and evoke powerful emotions. To top it all off they can also be incredible teaching tools.
Just because you think something's a waste of time doesn't mean other people aren't deriving real meaning from it.
Having said that, typically those "sucked in programmers" are not the ones working on the "art" side of things, like the story, for example.
I think the "sucking in" of talent is referring more to those whose talents are in development, and not so much in expression of art.
I'm not saying it's immoral, unrewarding, or not plain fun to play and build video games. I'm saying that in life you get to choose how you spend your time, and in my view building the next killing simulator when you have the talent and means to do so much more is probably something worthy of self-reflection.
- Will this make me happy?
- Are the people involved good people I can enjoy working with?
- Will this develop my skills in the way I want for my future?
- Will this enable me to open doors later that are shut now?
- Does this have a positive impact on the world?
- Will this have a long-lasting impact?
- Is this ethical, will it be used for good or evil?
- Is it something that I can be proud of? That I'll tell my grandkids about?
I've been lucky enough to work on a variety of things all of which stretched these constraints in wildly different directions. In each case I've tried to push things towards a happy medium when it was clear things were tilted too far in one direction. I'm quite happy with what I am working on now, as it is with a great team, provides good technical challenges, and has a positive, real impact on thousands of people's lives in an ethical, positive way, while potentially having a long term impact on building sustainable, local economies as a whole.
The point of my post is not to 'judge' people doing things they enjoy. It's to point out that it's important to keep in mind these tradeoffs and be honest with yourself. At any point in my career I like to think if you asked me where what I was working on fell on these lines, I could give you an honest answer. I think there are many engineers who blindly follow technical problems wherever they lead, without thinking of the larger picture.
My original post was pointing out video games certainly, for the most part, fit into these tradeoffs in a common way. (Again, I am talking about applied software engineering in video games, not all facets of video games.) If you're working on fascinating computational geometry algorithms for the next game that lets people run around shooting each other in the head, I think you know where what you're doing falls on these dimensions, and I think it's important to know if you're comfortable there. (Yes, I play and love Quake 3.)
It's hard to phrase these things without people taking it personally, but I've known many engineers that wake up 10 years into their career and realize they've been working on incredibly interesting technical problems which are being applied to things they aren't really too stoked about.
Ok, you're saying, that you don't judge, but are doing it the whole time.
Your definition of meaningful is very simplistic. It's like saying, that exertion could be without catharsis. No, they can't be without each other. If they can't be without each other, than both are meaningful in the same way.
If I had said something along the lines "working on your college degree is a better use of your time than gambling your money away in a casino" I'd not be 'judging' gamblers who do so. I'd be judging the acts themselves and how I see their relative merit and the rewards they'll bring the person doing them. I'd also be stirring up less controversy.
It's disappointing that people in this thread have tried to attack me personally or twist my words to be interpreted as 'judgements.' I don't think it's controversial to say that playing video games excessively is, in the long run, not the most rewarding endeavor. The question is, does this extrapolate to making a career of the construction of games themselves (exclusively on the software engineering side, the topic of this thread.) I happen to think that it does, particularly when I look at all the energy and talent that goes into creating them and the draw they have due to the fact that our generation was raised on gaming and that it offers enticing technical challenges.
Yes, a programmer in the video game industry might spend their days debugging the mammary physics of "the next killing simulator". But they might also create the next Braid or Minecraft, helping a lot of people connect and have fun in the process. Similarly, a programmer outside the games industry is much more likely to be tweaking some bespoke piece of accounting software than they are making the next Facebook.
I think the reason for this is because the person working on Braid chose to balance technical challenges with other things important to them. A 2d platformer is certainly less interesting to build from an engineering standpoint than building a navier-stokes based milk dynamics solver in CUDA :) But, the Braid engineer knows they are working on an ambitious, novel piece of art. It's this tradeoff that I don't think most people are making, and I think most video game engineers do not see themselves as agents to push the boundary of contributing in an artistic sense to a greater whole as those on games like Braid do, particularly.
The post in this thread sparked my comment because it mentioned the most drawing position in gaming is the coveted engine programmer position. To me, this sounds like people want to work on bleeding-edge technical problems without regards to the fact their engines are probably being applied towards shoveling out violent, dry crap from the mainstream gaming studios. I once had one-dimensional goals like this too ("I want to work on global illumination algorithms!") but this has changed for me dramatically over time.
Possibly. But can you say that about building the video game equivalent of Citizen Kane, The Battleship Potemkin, or La jetée?
Such a shame that you claim to have the talent, but obviously don't have the imagination, to build something better.