Coding, gaming, and Dara O'Briain

I had the pleasure of going to the Cheltenham Science Festival today to listen to Dara O'Briain talk about coding, gaming, and neuroscience. It was brilliant, and nerdy, and interesting, and informative, and all the other good things one of these things should be.

The session was called Coding the Game, and also featured Alex McLean, Chris Cummings, and Luke Clark. Though it was only an hour long, it covered an awful lot of territory. The topic for most of the first half of the session was purely programming. They talked about how many programmers they used in one of their games, how the hundreds of thousands of lines of code are divided up and then put back together, and how you can follow all the rules of good coding right up until a few weeks before release - and then you're breaking every programming rule in the book just to get the game out and working on time!

The second half of the session looked at neuroscience, and how the brain responds to playing games. This was where I found myself only vaguely aware of the things talked about. Risk and reward systems in games I understand, but how those specifically relate to the dopamine effect was completely new to me. There was some very interesting info here, particularly on how the dopamine effect is just as present when a player nearly fails as it is when they simply succeed. It made me realise that, as a player, I feel a greater sense of achievement when I succeed after nearly failing then I do when I simply win. This is, in turn, something I feel like I could include in my own games quite frequently - but not so frequently that playing the game becomes to tense to continue!

In the last bit of the session, there were some questions which led to a variety of different topics being very briefly touched on. There was talk of women and gaming (which was very well handled, in my opinion), PS4 versus X-Box One, Raspberry Pi, getting into the industry without qualifications, fractals in game development (that one kinda went over my head), and so on. There were several other things discussed, but I can't remember them all off the top of my head.

While some of what I heard I already had guessed at, or already knew, there was a lot that I didn't. I came out of the session feeling more positive about game development in general, and my own hope of eventually working in this industry as well. And I got to hear Dara pop a few well-timed jokes as well. Major win for me!