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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

> hereThere is one inescapably weird thing about competitive Excel: spreadsheets are not fun. Spreadsheets are very powerful, very interesting, very important, but they are for work.

My nerdy friends have a saying. If you don't have a spreadsheet, are you even having fun? Of course, their idea of fun is to min/max whatever game is at hand in order to win as best they can, which sometimes sucks the joy out of it for the rest of the players but it's all also fun to see how broken some game mechanics are.

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Playing against professionals at the top of their game is rarely fun for amateurs in any kind of sport. You just lose, quickly, and don't even understand what's going on.

(Not applicable to semi-professionals, they can at least figure out what's happening and learn).

Game servers sometimes leak a lot of data to the client. I once built an app that would intercept API responses made by my legitimate game client and generate intelligence on every player's troop deployment on the entire server. It got to the point where I could track the logins of every player and predict whether they would login to attack during the next time period. Each player could deploy a fixed number of troops per each 24-hour cycle. There were 3 battles per cycle. Once they deployed all troops, they were just a spectator.

I recruited a 24/7 team and dominated that game. We could predict with 100% accuracy how the opponent's team members would deploy their troops, in what quantity, and when. :)

My data model updated a shared spreadsheet, so my team members could see the actions we still needed to take without having to learn a new UI.

If you enjoy problem solving and you're good at Excel often spreadsheets can be fun. It's not necessarily playing a game but about the satisfaction of logically laying out data, transformations and calculations in a way that solves a problem.

That's not fun for everyone but it is fun for some people. The same way coding challenges and learn 2 code gamified websites are fun for some people.

[Insert Dilbert "the knack" show segment]

This. Spreadsheets can be fun as means to solving an interesting problem; they have several things going on for them:

- Focused, incremental, working-memory friendly;

- Very fast feedback loop; it's a dopamine pumping 2D REPL;

- Free of all the devops bullshit, which infected all the "proper" programming tools to the degree it's getting hard to do a local "Hello World" without having to swim through it;

- Because of the derision it gets from "normie tech folks", doing something large in it gives you just the right amount of "hold my beer and watch this" bragging rights (in some ways, this is similar to demoscene on legacy platforms like Amiga).

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