Hacker News Reader

> Maybe it's just me, but I find work to only suck when there is a long commute time and it's 2015 and our stupid company is still running Ruby 1.8 on rails 2.3, there is no automated testing, the javascript is an unreadable pile or .rjs mess, and literally every bug is some variant of "undefined is not a function" happening at run-time (for which I get yelled at).

That's why you come home and program in a perfect world of Haskell (or some other toy), just like the farmer chooses the virtual farm over the real one.

> The article calls this "the realities of work" and that the inherent difficulties and uncertainties are natural to the problems of the "real world" and must be accepted.

In a certain sense, you're correct - the challenges to overcome in a game can have the same magnitude. In other sense, you're not. At the end of the day, game is still a game. Maybe it is the responsibility that you feel that makes the difference. In the real world, the stakes are higher; cannot that be the ultimate reason why the work sucks?

> In the real world, the stakes are higher; cannot that be the ultimate reason why the work sucks?

It could be, but I don't think it is. Doing something that's actually important feels awesome.

When you succeed.

When you drop the ball and it all goes to shit, it can literally drive people to suicide.

This is insightful in that games are engineered so everyone wins. The participation trophy effect has become stronger over time... in the 80s you could actually lose computer and video games, but now all you do is grind up a little slower, which is pretty lame. Aside from subcultural experiments like roguelike games which most participation trophy participants don't like.

The real world success rate is extremely low and on a long scale approaches 0 unless you're in the 1% in which case the rate approaches 1 of course, because they rig the rules, and their quislings get REALLY angry when anyone points it out.

Every time I hear a variant of the "games did X when I was younger, they don't anymore", I have to wonder what do they mean by "games". There is a ridiculous amount and variety of games made today, specially when compared to the eighties. All genres, difficulties and philosophies of design that existed back then still exist today. Most of them in the same amount, even. But when the pie gets very big, as it has, slices that don't grow start looking smaller. Both the "just grind some more" and "you lose you die" games existed in the eighties, and both exist today.

I think there is a real shift though. People talk about "nintendo hard" because most of the games of that era were that hard. Five or ten years ago health was a carefully managed resource in any "AAA" FPS; nowadays regenerating health is very much the norm.

I agree. All you have to do is watch videos of today's kids playing games from the previous era. I've seen some where a handful of kids were unable to finish the first level of Super Mario Bros after several tries. But to be fair, most people never say the third board of Donkey Kong.

Although, I do also agree that there are extremely hard games today. I just think they are aimed at people like me for nostalgia reasons but also the current players that actually want a challenge. Otherwise, the mechanic goes against the current trends best suited for making money in the market.

As for health being a carefully managed resource, there were also the games where you get hit once and you die. In those cases lives were the carefully managed resource. Which that type of game was common. They don't seem as common these days.

But I think most of the hard factor of games of the past was a holdover from arcades where the goal was to kill you within a few minutes so you would insert another quarter. Games at the time tended to mimic that mechanic.

> the goal was to kill you within a few minutes so you would insert another quarter

This is at the heart of "nintendo hard". Games were limited in content and scope, and ramping up difficulty was the only way to ensure the experience would last long enough to justify the cost.

> games are engineered so everyone wins

Not true, they are engineered to be fair, and that is a very key distinction. A gamer can be reasonably certain that with a good deal of persistence they will eventually be able to overcome any hurdle, even if it is made to appear insurmountable at first. Some examples would be the Dark Souls games and the recent Bloodborne.

Fair would be a game like monopoly. Or tic tac toe. Or chess, go. Yet its quite possible to lose a game of tic tac toe.

Its comical to think of a 2015 video game implementation of player v computer chess, where you never get checkmated, just have to move yet another piece, and never run out of pieces, until you finally win.

Fair only means that it is possible to win, not that it is guaranteed.

There's been a lot of talk about games nowadays being "too easy", but they have difficulty selectors for a reason. Gamers choosing an easier difficulty because they would prefer to experience the story with minimal frustration are still valid gamers, they are just tuning their entertainment experience to their preferences.

Disparaging gamers with those preferences by calling them a part of "participation trophy" culture is unfair and uncalled for. Their entertainment preferences are just as valid as your movie or book preferences, regardless of how "difficult" it is for you to experience the media.

I honestly apologize, in retrospect I think my analysis of the facts is spot on but I was a overly harsh and judgmental in commenting on those specific observations. For example I was absolutely correct in identifying them as part of "participation trophy culture" but I was absolutely incorrect about making fun of them for it. If they're having fun doing their thing and I'm having fun doing my thing thats OK. I'm generally very libertarian (small L) and that was pretty far out of character for me.

The extremely small number of game creators can result in restricted choices and frustration. I guess I've always got the indies, at least, even if dominant AAA style holds little appeal to me.

I appreciate your opinion and your apology, however I still don't follow or agree with your reasoning about "participation trophy culture". Certainly there are games out there that are hard to fail at, but ultimately it all boils down to the difficulty setting, doesn't it?

It sounds like you're proposing the Game Over screen come back and boot people back to the title screen to start all over, which doesn't suit many gaming formats, especially those formats developed or popularized in the last decade or two like RPGs and adventure games.

Can you give any examples?

If you lose a game of chess, you can set up the board again and play another game. If you lose a boss fight in Dark Souls, you reload your save and fight the boss again. If you lose a game of Counter-Strike, you wait three minutes in freelook and try not to get AWPed next round.

The only area of video gaming I can think of where your complaint applies is mobile, where you win by paying thousands of dollars for energy crystals or some such.

> Its comical to think of a 2015 video game implementation of player v computer chess, where you never get checkmated, just have to move yet another piece, and never run out of pieces, until you finally win.

That might actually be interesting. Most chess games are decided by blunders even at Grandmaster level. I'd love to see people try to work on a "perfect" game, with unlimited retries. Maybe we'd finally see whether White has a winning advantage.

1. Old games had to be hard because if they weren't, they would be too short. People would finish them straight away and exclaim "wait... that's it?".

2. The point of playing games isn't always to "win" or "lose". Sometimes the point is just to have an experience. To roleplay, to see a story unfold, etc.. Then a ruthless difficulty can get in the way of that experience. Or it might not - but the point is that difficulty and achievement aren't always the biggest points. At least not to me.

3. A lot of hard games are hard in a lame or lazy way. Or just in a "fake" way[1]. Games should be hard in a way that forces you to be more cunning, agile, faster and smarter. Not just blindly double the HP of all enemies, or make progress depend on an obscure secret which can not be guessed from the game, forcing you to buy some gaming magazine in order to progress further in the game.

[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FakeDifficulty

While I completely agree with your list of things that make work less fun, I think there's one important thing missing: the fact that you have to do it. It's strange but I like to program in my spare time, and I love to learn more about CS in general. But, when it's a job.. it kind of takes the fun out of it, because you have to do even when you no longer feel like it.

Just my opinion though!

100% agree. Just the change from "can" to "have to" instantly damages my motivation, obliterating it completely over longer time scales. This makes it incredibly difficult to be a decent employee even though I'm a quite good developer (having spent over 10 years programming, which was my hobby since childhood). It's soul-sucking and destroys self-confidence.

It's good to hear from others who think in the same way- I moved to a new job last year where there were no fixed hours (my previous job required that I should be in at 9am). This alone made me feel like I was going into the office because i 'wanted' to, not because I HAD to... Ironically I still end up going in for just after 9am everyday anyway, but that sense of freedom leaves me feeling so much happier on a day to day basis!

I used to work at a company that had no fixed hours... I usually spent at least 10 hours a day on the weekdays and often stopped in on the weekends and there was usually at least a smattering of people there, and collaboration and morale were both high. They really got it right on that one. Then investors started courting the company, and management started telling people they wanted butts in seats at 9:30am. Well as soon as 5:30 rolls around it became a ghost town.

Indeed. You have to do it 40+ hours a week, 50ish weeks a year. I'm not sure there's anything I'd voluntarily spend that much time on with such consistency.

I know some people can lose themselves in video games for whole weeks, my experience from the couple of times my wife and kids have left me home alone for a few days is that I have about 16 total hours of pent-up video game binging in me at any given time, and once that's satisfied I'm totally done with video games for the next several days and would rather fix things around the house or catch up on my reading or get outside. Anything but play video games.

If I had to wake up early to go play video games 40 hours a week every. single. week. (with another 5+ hours lost to commute) I doubt I'd make it through the second week before I started to dread it. And that's if I got to choose the games and didn't have to do anything work-ish related to them, just play, so 100% ideal conditions (not like the notoriously-crappy jobs of video game testers)

This is in fact the life of a video game tester, and everyone I know who's done it speaks of how quickly it becomes hell.

As it so happens, I'm thinking about consulting on exactly this. I have plenty of game design experience; last weekend I stumbled into a hackathon where I ended up giving an early-stage founder some ideas to radically improve an experience that everyone agrees sucks right now(consumer medicine). Based on that data point there's plenty of room to make this work, above and beyond the existing gamification tropes of putting badges and rewards on things. (Badges are an easy sell, but in essence, it was already there - recall "employee of the month" or "reward coupons.")

My pitch would be to make play - not just "fun" or compulsion loops, but the whole dynamic of playful activity - an organizational improvement process. The best results, as with most things, would need deep structural commitment, but there would be room even for a limited engagement to make some progress.

I too consider working in software to be fun.

But a vast majority of "work" out there is nothing like working in software.

So yes, it is probably just you (or us rather).

Personally, I think corporations can take a page from video game design and analyze their own employees work flows and design it

That would be nice, yes. Most organisations are tremendously bad at this kind of introspection. And like introspection of the individual, it's painful and time-consuming. Especially when a process doesn't work well and you get into the eternal battle of "we need better employees" vs "better training" vs "change the process".

Not to mention that plenty of managers are Calvinist enough to design the fun out of work; employee fun is presumed to be a cost to the company that must be minimised.

Trying to make work fun is a naive fool's errand. The nature of most work is to be repetitive, and repetition takes the fun out of anything.

You should try being a sysadmin. It's very rare that you'll do the same thing on any given two days.

As a programmer I never do the same thing every day. But dear god does it often feel like I'm stuck doing the same class of thing.

Get ticket. Reproduce bug. Fix bug. Close ticket. Repeat.

Fair point. The "task diversity" of systems administration is a different world, particularly in non-tech industries (most sysadmins are working in companies that do things other than technology). Low-voltage cabling, basic plumbing (yes, really -- got to get the condensing water out from the air mover somehow...), finding the fault lines between hardware and software. I also really love hiring sysadmins, because it really is entirely about finding people who are good at isolating and solving problems, and surprisingly little specific platform knowledge is needed going in (my first sysadmin job way back in 1999 involved managing a 24-node sendmail cluster sending cough cough totally legitimate email to large numbers of people. My supervisor handed me the Bat Book and said "you'll probably need this. Have fun.").

Ah yes, 1999, when to paraphrase Jason Calahanis in that one documentary "You'd get hired as an engineer for owning a keyboard and knowing how to type".

That's a pretty helpful process though. Otherwise you have customers and account managers screaming at you to fix things through email/voice. I've gotten a few of those and the sense of urgency was a nice break, but I'd die from stress if I couldn't firewall that communication with a ticket system.

But they don't let you work on new features? That sucks :(

Attitudes and beliefs seem to have a tendency to be self-fulfilling to a point. So of course making work fun is going to be hopeless if you've made up your mind already that most of it can't be fun.

> repetition takes the fun out of anything.

Except MMO's, which are probably the pinnacle of repetitive, work-like video games. Kill 10 rats times a billion.

That doesn't sound like fun, that sounds like addiction. And AIUI those games are very specifically designed to be addictive.

MMOs: not even once.

Ok, I'd like my work to be addictive, as long as I'm required to keep my 5 8-hour days, I might as well look forward to it.

I'm pretty sure that the repetition in MMOs is not what most people consider the meat of the fun. It's an obstacle to get to the fun, because nobody can create enough real content to satisfy players.

The big assumption here is that people are using their time optimally all the time. I think instead we simply run out of motivation and deal with whatever is going on instead of looking for the 'best' way to have fun/work. We're familiar with it, and dislike the cost associated with finding something new.

Your Protestant work ethic is showing.

> repetition takes the fun out of anything.

I get where you're coming from, but this statement is easily disproven with any example of anybody who enjoys any repetitive task.

I think the difference between painful and tolerable (or even fun!) repetition is context and measurement. You need to know why you're doing what you're doing, how it matters, how it helps.

I remember reading in 'Made To Stick' about this famous cookhouse in Iraq, where the chef felt that him and his crew weren't merely responsible for providing rations, but for the morale of the troops. To them, their repetitive work had meaning.

Repetition can also be fun when you get better at what you're doing. Look up videos on YouTube of folks in India making prata– they add all sorts of styles and flourish to their mundane tasks, and they clearly take a lot of pride in being so good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Egltg4kW06Q

Tons of games are repetitive. All that free to play stuff. MMOs. Old arcade games.

Tons of games have super tight "gameplay loops". Super meat boy - try, die, repeat right away until you win. Over and over and over again. Every level is just a variation of something before it.

I don't think people dislike repetition at all. People repeat stuff all the time and like it. So there must be something else going on.