An earlier blog post brought up the question of “Where is the Fun?” (also the name of the post), with respect to those who were designing the games. I agree that the fun in designing the games was not just the representation of a ship as a collection of dots in a certain formation, but rather the significance of those dots. Whereas before they would have been some data presented for some work-related purpose, now they took on the meaning of a ship. The imagination necessary in thinking of the dots as a ship was where fun was, as that imagination was absent in using the computer for work related purposes.
However, I also feel that a large portion of the enjoyment from creating games came from the simple feeling of creating something. Making something like a building, food dish, painting, knit sweater, or anything else gives a sense of accomplishment, and it is the same with programming games. But there is also the satisfaction gained from overcoming challenges that contributes to the drive to create. As a computer science student, I’ve had to do a significant amount of programming, and a lot of the fun is from the puzzle-like nature of figuring out how to design a certain feature. The designers of these early video games must have felt that satisfaction, even more so because there was not really anything similar ever created before. Programming a game of tic-tac-toe can be rewarding when you finish, everything works, and you can say that you created it, but it must feel even better when you are the first one to create a tic-tac-toe computer game. For some, creating the game itself might have been more fun than actually playing it.