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Video Games: Gateway To a Programming Career?
Nerval's Lobster writes: Want more people to program? Encourage them to play more video games, at least according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In an online Q&A, Zuckerberg suggested that a lifetime spent playing video games could prep kids and young adults for careers as programmers. "I actually think giving people the opportunity to play around with different stuff is one of the best things you can do," he told the audience. "I definitely would not have gotten into programming if I hadn't played games as a kid." A handful of games, most notably Minecraft, already have a reputation for encouraging kids to not only think analytically, but also modify the gaming environment — the first steps toward actually wrestling with code.
Those of you who have done programming work in your career: did video games influence your path?
Not only did I learn to read because I wanted to play the Adventures of Spiderman Text-heavy adventure game, but I knew exactly what I wanted to do for a career from a very young age due to computer gaming exposure
So it was 1993. My friends and I all loved video games, consoles, etc. In '92 we had all gotten hooked on Wolfenstien, and most of us already had computers cobbled together from things begged, borrowed and stolen. We spent days tweaking our config.sys and autoexec.bats to get the most of what little ram we had. (himem.sys, load TSR high) Then Doom came out.
We started doing dial up games almost immediately. Then one day one of our friends tells us about LANNING a game. We all bought into it, getting 3c509c's? Ahh those days, magelink for transferring maps, loading ipxodi, lots of fun. "WHO UNPLUGGED THE TERMINATOR?"
From there a lot of us went to tech support for the then blossoming ISP industry, and from that we went on to desktop support, and bigger and greater things. I owe my career to video games.
It's been a running gag for years that every single Computer Science major I knew going through college got into the field because they wanted to make games (though some deny it later on). Somewhere along the way, 98% of them realized that the games industry is a soul-sucking space with horrible deadlines, poor pay, and high rates of failure, so they decided to go for something else, but everyone I knew got into the field because they wanted to know how to make games.
And the reason they wanted to know how to make games? Because they played games and thought they had something to contribute, or else wanted to play the game they had in their head that no one else had made yet, or else they wanted to experience the joy of having someone else play their game. But all of that starts with having played games first.