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Comment by throwaway74432 | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean to knock this video or anyone that gets a kick out of it. But does anyone else feel a sense of despair when they see that someone has put so much time and effort into something like this? I feel the same about speedrunners. Yes, they aren't hurting anyone, and yes they're following their passion, but I still feel an instinctual sense of despair when I see someone work so hard on something like this. I'm sincerely not trying to hate on anyone.

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Whether you consider videogames worthy of extended time and attention or not, that's entirely subjective and you are correct (for yourself) whatever your take is.

Even in the case of assuming that you consider videogames completely worthless and a blight on humanity, surely you can appreciate that the person in this video has demonstrated an ability to reverse-engineer and understand extremely complex systems that were designed and shipped under very tight deadlines and not-very-good tooling... plus they have the ability to teach this knowledge in ways that non-experts can easily follow and understand.

I would not say loving videogames makes for a good engineer, but I will say that my engineering growth was boosted by the opportunities granted to those videogames I loved when I was younger and how easy it was to inspect and disassemble them.

For some The Cutting Room Floor is a website about unused content, but for other people that website is a gateway drug to needing to peel behind the curtain and understand how the sausage is made.

My despair is that you think he should have spent his effort on something you find, I assume, to be more productive than this. He’s an expert is a video game, it’s wonderful that we have the material abundance to allow that.

Our eternally insatiable urge to learn how things around us work and create new things from that knowledge is what makes us human.

This is a bit of an extreme case, yes, but it's still fundamentally the same thing: someone dedicating their time to understanding something and sharing that knowledge with others, even if it's not particularly useful knowledge.

Pannen's insane dedication to SM64 and the quality of his content have earned him a sort of small cult following over the years of people who watch almost every video he uploads, including me. With that in mind, it's hard for me to say the time was wasted on his part.

Some people really like to know how things work and are willing to put a lot of time in to understanding the thing that interests them. I don't feel despair. I'm glad they have a passion and feel so strongly about something that they wish to dedicate their time to their passion. If anything, I'm a little jealous. To each their own.

I agree. The insights are a small subset of what you’d discover writing a game. It’s like watching someone paint a wall with a model brush.

This to me is an example of an unhealthy special interest. I don’t doubt that it makes them happy, but one has to wonder about the personal consequences of a lifestyle which allows for a 10 month project like this. Will they still be content after another decade of this, or will they regret spending their youth studying a toy?

> But does anyone else feel a sense of despair when they see that someone has put so much time and effort into something like this?

No, but I feel a sense of despair when someone is so solipsist as to consider their own values as some kind of objectivity against which to measure others.

Psychologically speaking my knee jerk diagnosis would be that you have an ego problem. Some random guy out there does something that doesn’t have anything to do with you, but you feel “attacked” because it makes you question your own lifestyle and values.

And no, please don’t take substances to fix psychological issues that just take some awareness and reflection.

I guess I just wonder how someone can afford to spend 10 months working on a SM64 video full time.

Self-funded by his YouTube videos? Ok.

Lives at home and taken care of by enabling parents? Suddenly not a harmless passion project.

It seems to me that if/when AI gets good enough to take over all the jobs then stuff like this is what we'll have left to do. We can always make up games to play and compete on and analyze. Maybe that's depressing to you, but I guess I don't see anything wrong with it.

> Yes, they aren't hurting anyone, and yes they're following their passion

Good, you're able to explain why it shouldn't bother you. The next question is why does it bother you? Any explanations from your side?

Not really. I wish I had:

- that much drive

and

- that much time to sink into pleasurable (useful or not) endeavor

watching people talk about something they have a passion in (whatever that topic might be) is really interesting to me

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