> my understanding from game dev friends is that's precisely what they do, no?
Do what? Program games in a Lisp engine? That's quite atypical, which is unfortunate. It's almost impossible to convey the sensation of "living" within a Lisp machine. Those who haven't experienced Lisp programming and haven't become accustomed to the process cannot grasp the dopamine effect of writing instructions virtually anywhere, at any time, changing the things on the fly. It's enormously empowering, and it's incredibly liberating.
That's why those who at least once unleashed the true power of Emacs simply can't feel the same joy in anything else. Other editor and IDEs talk about features like "keyboard macros" and how powerful they are, yet they fail to grasp that Emacs operates on an entirely different plane - its keyboard macros are programmable constructs that can be created, modified at the Lisp expression level, and converted into full-fledged functions from any recorded sequence.
Using Emacs is like playing a video game where you level up by writing s-expressions. The profound satisfaction of shaping the system to match your exact needs is immense, and sadly remains vastly underappreciated. Even when curios newbies come to explore this "immense power of Emacs", they don't even realize that it all is possible only because of Lisp.
It just feels weird to me that the gamedev community outright rejects the idea of programming in Lisp. To me (a Lisper) writing games that way makes absolute sense - games should be written as if you're playing one, right?