Jason Kealey of LavaBlast wrote an interesting piece of how Super Mario Brothers made him a better software engineer (or “junior engineer” in his Canadian terms).
I think this is an interesting viewpoint to take. I remember having one of the first Nintendo system of my friends, but even before that I had a Coleco system and an Apple IIc+ with games.
Did any of that influence me? I’m willing to say yes. If I had never played video games as a kid, then I’d used my computer for word processing and spreadsheets for schoolwork.
As a teenager, I played games and attempted to write my own games. This taught me the very basics (and frustrations) of programming. I think this helped guide my early thought processes towards a more logical path and allowed me to more easier think in terms of conditional (if/switch), iteration (for, do, for each), and jump (goto, break, return) statements along with logic processing, which gave me a bit of an advantage later in life as I began professionally programming.
I don’t know if the actual act of playing video games made me a better programmer or software engineer, but I would credit the creativity the video games unleashed as the result of playing them as more of the influence than the time spent playing games.
When I was younger, I probably spent as much time trying to make my own games or hacking shareware games on floppy disks as I did playing them.
Does playing games today help me? Probably not, but it still unleashes some creativity sparks when I find a rather interesting concept or an exceptional user interface design. And regardless, it’s still fun and a great way to relieve some stress after writing a design or requirements document or finding out that you have to re-code a large section of the application due to “unforeseen circumstances.”
Another article related to this is by Tim Stall at the .NET Developer’s Journal titled “10 Rules that Age of Empires Teaches about Development“.
[Via Arjan's World linkblog]
