Human Resource Machine and World of Goo

So I played World of Goo, a delightful physics puzzle game (which the creators describe as a game version of Hooke's Law), and then a week later, when I started playing Human Resource Machine, made the brilliant observation that they offer a very similar experience. HRM gives only the loosest of storylines to its learn-to-code-in-assembly mechanic, but the colorful visualizations, free moving pieces, and hilarious extinction event quietly occurring outside the office while you slowly age 40 years, moving things from an inbox to an outbox using increasingly complicated code, well, it kept me really entertained. How cool, I enthused to my boyfriend, to get this really visceral sense of how coding is just like a puzzle game! You have a problem that needs solving, a limited number of tools, and you need to do them in the right order. HRM was more my style, actually, because your Goo solutions could fail due to twitch incompetence (bane of my gameless-childhood fingers), whereas HRM is pure puzzle solving. Even the sense of humor and cartoony visual style is similar! I had the paper half written. Then it turned out that they were developed by the same company and their similarities were entirely explained by common authorship. So, oops.

But still! It's not an accident that a coding game feels so much like a puzzle game and vice versa. Emotionally, the experience I've often had playing games closely resembles my experience in the winter of 2014, when I was a fretful 3rd year grad student spending 10 weeks learning how to code in an effort to procrastinate my dissertation. I came up with a whole lot of theories at the time for why it was so painful, but they all basically boiled down to this: coding gives you a problem and doesn't care how much you try to solve it, unless you actually solve it. It doesn't care about your effort, or outside-the-box ways of thinking it through, or all the very creative ways you could imagine not coding it and doing something else with it instead. It's like a stony-faced, dispassionate god that not only refuses to have mercy, but, as you proffer one spectacular failure after another, doesn't care at all that you did. For a student who succeeded quite excellently through 23 years of education before that point mostly by *making* things care about each other and relate differently to each other, this was a horrifying revelation. My masterfully developed tools of expression, interpretation, and creativity were utterly useless. So I bashed my head against a lot of walls and eventually learned the new rules, but resentfully.

And games are the same! I've realized that the games I played in my childhood all contained theatrical elements, even if they weren't supposed to; I would turn cards into diplomacy and chess into relationship tests. Unsurprisingly, I pretty much hated conventional games (and, I'm sure, was a real pleasure to play with) but loved theater. These objective gods, these rules that don't care what you love or what you are, they seemed like massive insect brains, uncomprehending.

#coding #puzzle #experience #losing