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Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

That's sort of the point.

A lot of people got drawn into the industry in its latest boom and found themselves glueing together remote services using an ever-changing collection of heavy frontend frameworks and never experienced actually modeling an application from top to bottom. It doesn't need to be a game, but doing more of the dirty work that "[you] have no idea how to model" andis "more complicated than anything [you]'ve ever seen" can help induct you into a much richer and more cognizant craft practice.

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This isn't so much the old argument of (say) Next.js v HTML(x), but of the different degrees of state complexity required in a typical business app vs an actual game (at least to my mind).

To me, it's a lot clearer how to deal with a traditional ecommerce database setup like Northwind Traders (https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Database_Examples/Northwind). I've had to do that many times and know how to model such a thing.

I have no idea how to start modeling the state for a game like Wingspan (https://boardgamearena.com/gamepanel?game=wingspan), much less something more complicated, like Magic: The Gathering, where any of several tens of thousands of cards can interact with each other in novel ways, maybe even leading to infinite loops and such. In my mind it's like a giant if-then flowchart with a billion flows. I wish I could see the source code for the rules engine of such a thing, but with a step-by-step tutorial...

The Magic the Gathering Comprehensive Rules are a fun read: https://blogs.magicjudges.org/rules/cr/

It's in English rather than computer code, but it sets out the data model and game loop in a way that should feel pretty familiar to programmers.

I’d be deeply surprised if a webapp requiring Next.js doesn’t have a state machine in any components.

If you’re past the complexity threshold for Next.js, you’ve run into what’s really probably the most fundamental construct in computing.

They’re not that complex. They’re just presented in academic language.

If you can program professionally, you’re very capable of self-studying a bachelor’s degree’s worth of CS.

https://github.com/radar/mtg

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