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> I've realized that game development is a great coping mechanism to help you feel safe and in control. You are the master of your own universe. For some reason it also helps you feel worthy, like you've accomplished something.

> I'm not saying gamedev is bad, but I think a lot of people unknowingly use it to self-medicate.

Great insight - IMHO, among the most valuable people can have in life. Of course it is not particular to games or development; it's the motivation for many of us doing many things. Some go to the bar and pick up sex partners - or get in fights, some fix up their homes or cars, some knit, some run marathons, some make FOSS, some do drugs, some bully other people or abuse their pets, some play Call of Duty, etc.

I think the trick is to realize what you are doing - coping, feeling some control, etc,. - accepting that it's a good, healthy instinct, and finding a good healthy way to do it. Art is a great outlet, serial sex partners - usually not so much (not judging, just observing).

The fundamental metric is not to get stuck on 'do I feel better while I'm doing it' but to choose based on, 'do I feel better after I do it' and also, 'is the world slightly better after I do it?'.

Am I missing something on the sex partner comment? Courting consenting adults for fun and pleasure may be done safely and it's a fine creative outlet. For example those on PrEP need to undergo tests four times a year (for HIV and all common STIs) if they want to keep the pill. That's excellent sexual health care if you ask me.

> That's excellent sexual health care if you ask me.

I am talking about emotional health, not physical.

> Courting consenting adults for fun and pleasure may be done safely and it's a fine creative outlet.

Most things can be healthy or not; we are not talking about the actions but, again, the emotions. Cleaning your kitchen can be a healthy outlet; doing it because of OCD seems probably unhealthy. Very generally speaking, serial sexual partners to satisfy needs for control, mastery, security, etc. seems like not the most emotionally healthy solution. (It has nothing to do with sex in particular nor with some puritanical view of it.)

> I've realized that game development is a great coping mechanism to help you feel safe and in control. You are the master of your own universe.

This is THE reason I started programming when I was 11 years old! I was always dreaming of this universe that I would create. I even tried to make an RPG game using Game Maker. I stopped when, after a couple of weeks, I had a barely working fighting system and nothing else. I learned that games are huge!

Later, while I was in university, I implemented four gamedev frameworks. Every time I decided I was done, I would develop a small game with it and I always found something I didn't like. A few months later I would start from scratch having learned something new and trying to find a solution to what I hadn't liked. At some point I realized I enjoyed better writing the framework than the actual game.

Funnily enough, I never went into game dev professionally. Although I still implement libraries that nobody, other than me, uses from scratch in my free time.

Haha. Similar for me. I spent months and month writing a 2D 360° scrolling game engine in x86 assembler, and a level builder. I drew all the sprites and tiles, labored over animation, parallax, collision detection, multichannel audio and optimized the bejeezus out of it so it ran as efficiently as possible on my 486.

Turns out I don't like designing games, I built just enough level to test everything, got bored and started all over again... haha.

I realized - in the midst of a professional career that had a dry spell - that I do enjoy some parts of game design, but the type of game I should design should not be too heavy on overt rules, stats, and systems, and instead work on the intuitive and holistic parts.

I had to learn what was enjoyable about it by first burning out on what I didn't. This is a form of artistic journey that spans all mediums. Games often have many layers. If you don't really know why you're adding a certain layer, like a level design, or cutscenes, it instantly turns into a morale crusher that can spiral into ever-increasing scope(by way of "it's not good yet, add more"). And it's easy to fall into that with vague justifiers like "every game is better with more stuff" or "I spent time on it so I'm gonna use it". Eliminating contradictory elements removes morale crushers, but can leave the game barebones and underdesigned. The solution to that is to inject themes and principles that suggest the specific possibilities. Then you are simply including the elements that cohere to principle, which quickly "develops" the game out of the tech demo stage. In the blink of an eye it can go from nothing to a great game, if the groundwork was set up well.

Of course, most games are products, and products need product features, which take things away from the artistic goal. But if you can build it small enough, it can be a hobby :)

Are you me?

I spent much of my childhood working on a tabletop RPG with my brother. Then decades later working on and off on various gamedev projects.

I used to beat myself up for never finishing anything. Only with therapy over the past couple of years did it finally click for me that many times these projects were escapes. The point was not to finish them so that the were a safe place I could retreat to when my life felt uncontrolled and chaotic.

I was absolutely using it unknowingly to self-medicate. I still do so—I literally just took a break from hacking on my fantasy console project to check HN—but I'm a lot more mindful of my motivations now. It's OK to want some escapism now and then. Certainly with the pandemic, it's entirely reasonably to want a space where one feels they have some control because we sure as shit don't have control over COVID.

But I try to make sure I'm not using it as an unhealthy way to avoid chaos that I should be tackling.

I'm doing this right now on my language platform.

On one hand, I'm inventing a new way to build online experiences (games, social apps, collaborative apps, small/medium business)

On the other hand, I have no customers

I have 100% code coverage for many of the packages.

I'm building my own gossip failure detector right now using some blockchain ideas so I can gossip really-really quickly at an exceptional low rate.

All this madness started because I was building an online board game.

Fortunately, I've retired from big tech and can afford a few years to indulge myself.

Check it out: http://www.adama-lang.org/

I think that applies to making anything completely by yourself, a DAW, a drawing app, a house. The only problem I'm facing is: I keep going deeper and deeper in making tools and never made a game since (game engine -> programming language -> OS), tbh I am a bit jealous to see people already using Unity making cool effects, where I would have to spend weeks learning the maths and engineering behind those

> After getting some counseling and getting married, I've realized that game development is a great coping mechanism to help you feel safe and in control. You are the master of your own universe. For some reason it also helps you feel worthy, like you've accomplished something.

> I'm not saying gamedev is bad, but I think a lot of people unknowingly use it to self-medicate.

This goes for any form of art: writing, painting, music, filmmaking, etc.

Reading this whilst waiting for Unity to finish importing.. yeah. It's my holiday, and a piece of me can comfortably think that I'm improving my skills, making something that might one-day sell for a bit of money, but realistically just cheers me up to make something pretty.

I guess you gotta ask yourself if it matters whether anyone else ever sees it.

Knowing that the "computer nerd" is the archetypical male fight/flight hybrid coping mechanism from childhood trauma, this is unsurprising. A lot of my own life struggles became easier to understand when I started unwrapping my trauma with a therapist.

I am interested in this theory and how it might to apply to me. Do you have anything I can look at to back this statement up?

Knowing a lot of creative people with a drive that could be interpreted through the lens of pathology, on the other side of it, what does healthy look like?

What is pathological? The need to feel safe and have some control? That is perfectly healthy. How you do it - that is where unhealthy things can happen. Is art an unhealthy way to do it?

I've known plenty of amazing creative artistic people who were definitely unhealthy in terms of how they pursued their art.

I'm also interested in the GP's question: what does healthy look like?

So what exactly is it that we are self-medicating? The disability to fit in with others? That would be too much of a clichee for my taste. When i was young i could always imagine a greater game, no matter how great the games i had. Out of this grew the desire to make. Of course i failed. But isnt this quite an appealing conditio humana after all?

>>I would joke that I had a disease

Ha!I just say that I'm a bit crazy! For whatever reason I decided to build a physics engine from scratch, along with the game engine (not done yet). Not really sure why other than a really bad itch that I just had to scratch.

> I've realized that game development is a great coping mechanism to help you feel safe and in control.

Would this also work for, say, programming language and compiler design (which is also in a way about creating new, abstract worlds)?

It works for anything that makes you feel safe, in control, accomplished, etc. It's not related to the means. Every human has done it since the dawn of homo sapiens, and probably our ancestors too. It was done before computers, before books, etc. Paint something on a cave wall, if it works for you!

Many people have learned that making your own engine from scratch is a bad idea if you want to make a game. Your takeaway that game development itself is somehow dysfunctional doesn't necessarily follow from this.

This hits hard for me. The part about being in control especially.

Same. I spent 5 or so years working on a project when I (sh/c)ould have been working on myself. I knew I needed to be doing something so I manifested that change externally which made me feel like I was making progress on something - something apprehendable.

What I needed to do instead was realize what those needs were, where they were coming from, and address them directly. Now I have a lot of catching up to do back-dropped with the emotional texture of lost time.

Unfortunately it is never simple. All my previous therapists affirmed my own projects as positive and even admirable and encouraged me to continue working on them. That was in spite of me ostensibly seeking out a therapist to address other issues despite believing that I was receiving some amount of fulfillment from the projects also.

Whenever I leave my project, it doesn't feel like there's a whole lot else I would rather do. When I seek answers, the "tough" advice that I'm greeted with instructs me to make something of my life. But wasn't that what I was already doing when I was still working on my projects? So I don't see any reason not to go back, if I can't find a way to make other kinds of progress myself, or am too good at avoiding internalizing the need for it constantly.

Unfortunately, if you tend to gravitate towards computers, and fail to find a professional who can give you more constructive ideas on how to define a concept as ambiguous as "working on oneself", it becomes far too easy to go back and self-medicate. I find it hard to judge someone else on the basis of how passionate they are about their hobbies, but if it's directed towards ourselves instead it sounds like we ought to be doing it more.