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Comment by wheybags | Hacker News Reader

Seems kinda backwards. I would say a video game is like a job but (hopefully) without the bad parts.

I'm making a puzzle game, so the comparison to dev work is pretty obvious. The difference is when you play a puzzle game, you know there is a solution, and the world is crafted to make finding it as fun as possible. The real world is messy. Questions like "should we even do this at all" come up. There are edge cases, and your information is imperfect.

In a puzzle game, you can (generally) see everything, you know what you can see is 100% correct, etc. Games are like an idealised chunk of real life, not the other way around. And IMO that's by design, not some accident.

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>> when you play a puzzle game, you know there is a solution,

Not in my solitaire game. It actually shuffles the cards, dealing them rather than working backwards from a solution. I have been dealt games with no legal first move, and many more with only one or two dead-end moves. These deals have no possible solutions. Similarly, I have run across more than a few sudokus with more than one solution, meaning there is no actual final answer.

Famously, what made Tetris so different was it's soviet style. There is no end let alone a solution. There is no second chance. Your mistakes just pile up until you fail.

But to be fair, "there is no solution" is, itself, a solution. Even in Tetris, which has no natural win condition, you're playing towards a specific, well-defined goal (points, generally).

The OP's point still stands in that there's no ambiguity in a game, whereas the real world is full of it.

"The OP's point still stands in that there's no ambiguity in a game"

What about minecraft and other open world sandbox games? Sometimes you can play a story, but minecraft got succesful before it had anything like it.

That is the difference between a "game" and a "toy". One does not win or finish playing with a toy. Some software is games. Other software is a toy. This was a big deal when SimCity was pitched. There is no win. That's OK.

> Famously, what made Tetris so different was it's soviet style. There is no end let alone a solution. There is no second chance. Your mistakes just pile up until you fail.

Tetris is actually quite lenient in that regard. Mistakes are rarely fatal, you usually need to screw up pretty badly to find yourself in an unrecoverable situation. Generally, you lose by making mistakes at a higher rate than you can fix them. This is in contrast to games where you have a limited number of lives, famously a single one for Rogue, hence the term "Rogue-like".

And while Tetris have no "hard" ending, like many arcade-style games, at some point, it becomes effectively unplayable. Maybe that's what made it successful, it is an arcade game as much as it is a puzzle game.

For Tetris: keep two rightmost columns open, and always prioritize on laying flat than plugging every holes. That way, any blocks can be just hard dropped to that slot to immediately clear two rows on average, and keep depths of notches and peaks to around two as well.

Funny thing about this is how knowing these tricks completely change gameplay, and that everyone who knows always reserve up to ~15% potential for immediately presentable and tangible results, and it's naive hard working players who gets punished, and it has no promises that it always works, and that these facts adds so much Soviet-ness to the game!

> Famously, what made Tetris so different was it's soviet style. There is no end let alone a solution. There is no second chance. Your mistakes just pile up until you fail.

This is the central theme in the Tetronimia (Tetris clone) description:

> "The only winning move is not to play"

And later:

> I don't like computer games. They:

> Steal your time

> Replace meaningful activity

> Show how easy it is to manipulate a human into doing silly things

> Deceive you into thinking you're in control

> Disappoint you in the end

> Tetronimia does all of the above. Nothing more. It's ideal. Did I mention you can't win?

https://github.com/indiscipline/tetronimia

> I would say a video game is like a job but (hopefully) without the bad parts.

I find video games to be like a job, but without the good part.

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