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Comment by jf | Hacker News Reader

This is one of my all time favorite games. It and Shenzhen I/O do a wonderful job of capturing the essence of what makes programming fun and put them into a game.

My biggest surprise from playing EXAPUNKS is how futile it is to try and pre-optimize a solution. I had to remind myself time and again to solve the puzzle first, then try and try and optimize it.

While the games are fun on their own, I recommend playing them at the same time as a friend. Trash-talking about finding more optimal solutions really added to the overall fun of playing the games.

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> capturing the essence of what makes programming fun and put them into a game.

They definitely straddle there line between "those is a fun video game" and "it looks too much like my job" for people in the industry, but there's a whole genre of workplace simulators for doing other people's jobs vicariously. A semi truck driver would see playing a semi truck simulator in the same way, but American Truck Simulator is quite popular. Anyway, play Zachatronics games if you find them fun, but if you don't, then, uh, don't feel bad about not playing them.

Too true. I used to absolutely love Zachtronics games. Then I became a professional programmer and I just can’t play the programming themed ones anymore. Kind of a shame because TIS-100 is what made me want to be a programmer in the first place.

I used to feel the same but, with the LLM mandates made me have more fun playing Shenzhen I/O than actually programming at work. I'm one of "those people".

I have a strong feeling that with the advent of AI these kind of games are going to come back in style. Many programmers myself included aren't doing that much "coding" in the workplace anymore.

Even if we ignore AI for a moment, I doubt many programmers actually solve the kind of challenges Zachtronics games are known for on a daily basis.

For me, it’s less that I’m burned out on coding and more of a feeling that if I’m going to be doing puzzles in assembly I mine as well just do it in real assembly.

As an older engineer, I love the Zachtronic games because they're pure development and I don't have to drive consensus or herd cats.

I should set up a LARP where 30 people solve TIS-100 together

Make sure you get those JIRAs filed and pointed. Standup is at 10:30.

Hey can you do this high priority thing real fast? It shouldn't affect your timelines, just throw some AI at it

We're pushing the rewrite back another quarter, so that soap integration needs to be actioned asap.

Will the LARP costumes require suits and ties and a Company Song, ala 1960s IBM, or require scruffiness and nap rooms ala dot-com-bubble tech startups?

...our vision of global strategy...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCvKXgp-Awo

There's a good vice article about that very topic.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-do-we-play-video-games-t...

There's a portion of American / European Truck Simulator's playerbase who are truckers. I've even seen a few streams from guys playing ATS/ETS in their sleeper cabs. Some of them have said the game is a way of processing the stresses in their jobs. I found that very interesting.

It's an interesting contrast to programmers and programming games. For me personally, the best way to process is to do just about anything else. Programming games are most fun when I haven't had to do much coding recently. Though sometimes, if I'm already in the flow, it's fun to play one of them and ace it since I'm already in the right mindset.

I feel the same as you about programming games, but can sort of see it for truckers, because surely some truck drivers picked that job because getting in the "flow" of long-distance driving appealed to them. I presume the trucking games try to appeal to exactly that feeling without, as you say, many of the actual stressors of the job.

So I can imagine it might let them reconnect with that feeling and be a relaxing experience much more easily than a programming puzzle game would let us reconnect with what we love about programming. Being a puzzle game it inherently will involve some frustration, which is the thing I want to escape from after a day of programming.

I love the Zachtronics games and Zach-likes, but, for hardware engineering the minor differences with reality drive me crazy. Such as the clock edge timing in Shenzhen I/O and other points where something so lifelike doesn't work the way I know it does in real life.

I also get this problem when I play Linux-terminal-emulating games like the various "global hacker" CLI based games.

I enjoyed both TIS-100 and Exapunks though I didn't have the patience to finish either of them. For me they get too hard (due to constraints) too fast (if not straight up obscure).

I had a great evening with a friend playing through TIS-100 together. We plugged in two keyboards and mice so we didn't have to pass them back and forth.

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