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Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

This is not like defragmenting a disk at all. There are no sectors or clusters, I can and have to move entire files at once. I have to move them in some fixed order and I can only move each once. Files can bump into each other?!? This is extremely confusing if you think the game is about what the names says.

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This is generally my fear in creating a game in that the players would take the name and rules more seriously than me as a designer.

I liked the game, btw as it captured a certain look and feel as well as was fun to play.

I think what happened here is that author didn't include instructions, the UX was not clear, and the author said if you are old enough to remember defrag you'll just know what to do. But on the Internet everyone's a pedant and many of us remember DOS/ windows defrag in more detail than the OP seems to, so there's confusion/complaining. All that is par for the course though and hopefully you will still make and share awesome games!

Quoting OP's:

|> it inspired me to create this small game.

It was inspiration, not a simulation nor it claimed to be realistic. This is the type of artistic license that game designers have always had at their disposal.

I am not complaining about how the game works, I am just saying that there are no instructions, so the only thing I have to work with is the name and the inspiration. And if you know how defragmentation works, this all just makes no sense, why does it automatically select blocks, why can I not move them repeatedly and to any free space? Sure, most people do not know what defragmentation is and how it works, even in developer circles I would not expect people to know if they are not old enough to have worked with computers in the 90s, they might hear about this in one computer science lecture and never think about it again.

I'm pretty sure that there have been disk formats that only write files to consecutive sectors just like memory allocators that only return contiguous blocks of memory.

Then you need frequent compaction of the space because it ends up full of small unallocated blocks.

See https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/file-allocation-methods/

It's quite a bit more "realistic" if you imagine it as a simulation of the "Defragment Free Space" option that at least some defraggers had.

Yeah, this needs an explanation, I went into it thinking it was like defragging and it took me a while to figure out how to play. Fun game, though.

Well... yeah but also defragmenting isn't a game. If you want to make a fun game out of it you're going to need to change a few things.

That said, I can't see how this is fun tbh.

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