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I think there is this concept of min/maxing in games that resonates in other areas of our lives.

In a game instead of going with the flow and trusting the process people tend to start reading guides how to make the most OP character, maximise stats, and make it a 100% completion.

This approach eventually sucks out the pleasure of exploration and random encounters that made the games so good and instead makes people spend hours on trying to maximise stats in a random dice roll fashion.

Similarly with other activities, the sense of wonder and "just because" goes out as we are all trying to max out something, whether its wealth or code quality.

> This approach eventually sucks out the pleasure of exploration and random encounters [...]

Oh, that depends entirely on the game and what your mood is. In something like Opus Magnum that min-maxing is the entire point. In something like Factorio or Oxygen Not Included you can have fun both with bumbling around or with min-maxing.

Also have a look at https://www.sirlin.net/ptw for some perspective. Playing to Win can be fun and rewarding. See especially the chapter https://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/love-of-the-game-not-playing...

> Now it’s time for what appears to be the opposite point of view: “playing to win” at all times is counter-productive. If you want to win over the long term, then you can’t play every single game as if it were a tournament finals. If you did, you wouldn’t have time for basic R&D, you’d never learn the quirky nuances that show up unexpectedly at tournaments, and you are likely to get stuck honing suboptimal tactics.

Man, I haven't seen David's site in forever... I remember the old Yomi posts about street fighter and the whole Hectóre Blivand design fiasco.

to be fair, that's partly the fault of the games themselves too. When the game does not provide immersion or a good story, all left is minmaxing. Developers who only add "content" and not actual memorable experiences make it so players just try to grind the game as fast as possible because they don't fundamentally enjoy the game loop, they just play for the extrinsic rewards (loot, skins, completion, achievements, whatever).

even games like minecraft are minmaxing now, even though it used to be all sorts of creative things, since the game encourages minmaxing and discourages anything else. (just see how things like minecarts, redstone etc. have been utterly neglected - in favour of exploiting elytras, villagers and building farms)

Minecraft (and to some extent, eg Factorio) is still very dominantly a free for all game. Nothing can recreate the first ten or hundred hours of gameplay, when you still keep discovering small and big stuff like tridents, coral reefs, bastions, frogs, lush caves, yes you will eventually build a cured villager trading hall and a wither skeleton skull farm and use beacons as street lamps and shulker boxes for wall textures. But that's the point. If you want to build a 100x scale statue of a shulker from shulker boxes, it's entirely your call, and your call alone, and no, it's not an easy project not by any measure.

> Nothing can recreate the first ten or hundred hours of gameplay, when you still keep discovering small and big stuff ...

Well, I played a lot of Minecraft back in the day, and I have never even heard of a single thing you just mentioned, which seems to disprove what you said there: In fact, as the devs keep adding stuff to the game, it can apparently stay fresh.

I don't think it disproves my point, I think it's the other side of the same coin. The game has so much breadth and depth that it doesn't matter in which direction you explore it; you will keep finding new ways to keep yourself amused, even without updates (some of the things I've named have been in the game for 5+ years).

> devs keep adding stuff to the game

I really wish they would add to the sea and sky.

Big sea/air ships or similar. Swimming and flying creatures etc. The land is pretty stocked up now.

Factorio is perhaps the best tangible example of why infrastructure matters, is very hard to correctly plan, difficult to scale without shutting everything down, and yet seems deceptively easy.

And yet there are so many ways to enjoy it without minmaxing to X spm. Try e.g. to beat the game without using belts (hint: use train cars), surviving the longest in a cranked-up deathworld, beating a 9-tall ribbon world (rocket silo is 9x9), and that's before you even add any mods.

Oh, for sure - I love the game. Haven’t had a lot of time to play it recently, but it’s delightful.

Except for when you realize far too late that you made some critical mistake much earlier, and will now have to refactor en masse. That’s less fun. Easier with a swarm of bots, but still less fun.

Min-Maxing can be fun. That's how you play Opus Magnum for example (but you don't have to.)

Different play styles suit different people, different moods and different games.

yeah but that's much different, on a puzzle game with an explicit goal of optimising, even a leaderboard and stuff.

I myself got pretty far on the Turing Complete leaderboard as well and I enjoyed it really much - but my comment was pretty much aimed at "general-purpose" games, not puzzle games which have the explicit goal to be optimised.

I'm not sure there are any 'general-purpose' games? I guess AAA games are that to the mainstream? Is that whey they are so same-y?

Pretty much anything which is not an indie game made with love.

Like, minmaxing in terraria is wayyyy less prevalent than minmaxing in minecraft, and that's a blatant difference in game design between both.

Of course, exceptions exist like factorio, which is a labour of love yet minmaxing is quite strong, but that's because that's one of the game's explicit goals.

however, in games like assassin's creed there shouldn't be too much place for minmaxing yet there is because the soulless decisions made by the developers.

Minecraft is a funny example, but it pretty much started out as (and stayed for many years) an indie game made with love.

I guess I mostly play single player indie games, so I don't really see many of the soulless games people keep complaining about. (And the non-indie games I play are mostly from Nintendo. The company might have many flaws, but a lack of soul in the games is not really one of them.)

well, yes, it started out great, then around ~1.6 or ~1.7 they've started to ruin the game and destroy the sandbox.

> In a game instead of going with the flow and trusting the process people tend to start reading guides how to make the most OP character, maximise stats, and make it a 100% completion.

I want to be the very best....

  I used to *enjoy* doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to *play* with it.  I used to do whatever I felt like doing - it didn't have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with.

https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/kilcup.1/262/feynman.html

Congrats on your admission to Princeton!

I had this same observation playing factorio. When I started I made spaghetti factories with a friend and had to constantly refactor as requirements changed in the game. It was a blast. Then we started getting into optimization and suddenly there was only one right way to do it. Overnight all the fun was sucked out of the game.

Often I will learn more by building things poorly with hubris and whimsy. “How hard can it be?” has gotten me in way over my head so many times. But I always learn a ton and discover fun digging my way out.

> clown school

The fact that everyone is either assuming this is an actual clown school or an Ivy League university is telling.

For the sake of their dignity I hope it's an actual clown school.

My role model when it comes to entrepreneurship (curious, kind, focused on sustainability and real value) is my outlaw*, also a clown!

I wrote about him earlier somewhere on HN, but here's a quick note describing his approach to work:

https://untested.sonnet.io/Physical+uncolouring+book#How+wou...

I thought you might enjoy reading this :)

PS. Always bet on clowns.

* father in law but from a previous marriage

> clown school

Please please please elaborate on this. I can probably guess what clown school is but ... what's the motivation here?!

Clowns are the last job that can be taken by AI.

If I was an AI, doing clown stuff would indeed be the last thing I would like to be forced to do

Better not try to force it, lest we unleash Bozo's Basilisk

clown school is great. it can take many forms too - there are classes, workshops, school-schools (i.e. some 1-day, some months-long)

a famous clown school is Philippe Gaulier's. famously, Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat, etc.) went (and unsurprisingly excelled) there.

this is a short/good? small snippet re: Gaulier's school - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wD4YFuJT0_E

but there's a lot more to it - there are schools and communities in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, ... everywhere? just as you'd find improv classes and communities all around the world.

as for motivation -- I'm not OP, but for me, it can be the same reasons that drive people to learn acting, or improv, or dancing, or meditation, or horse back riding. something about it is about exploring a new "thing" (being on stage, performing) and some is about exploring yourself (your limits, your subconscious, your inner child, etc.)

you should try it if you haven't. everyone should. :*)

That's it! You've all been holding me back too long. I'm going to clown college!

He doesn't have to justify his desire to go to clown school. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwUk19cWarI

>This is really silly. Life is for living, and I squeeze the fun out of software when I try too hard to do it "right".

TBH the incentives are usually not there for that effort. That gets people doing the bare minimum. It would be another thing if most developers had comp that scaled with how good your code does.

I'll thank you not to refer to Princeton that way.

Functions, while loops, if statements. What more can you need?

Youre missing the Pepe Silva strewn classes that tie into each other intricately, and in some occasions are abstraction layers of abstraction layers

With lisp, I only need functions.

Yeah but you're not taking advantage of what makes Lisp great unless you are also using symbols and singly linked lists.