I’m a little unusual in that I didn’t play a ton of games while I was working there. I had my games that I liked but I wasn’t a “gamer,” whereas most of the employees got into it because of some level of love for video games in general. There were actually games I worked on for significant lengths of time sometimes without even having played the game even once as a game. It was just a programming project, which that I had some love for and that was the side of it that I enjoyed.

To your actual question, I actually find it’s the opposite. Like you can know all about anatomy and psychology and if you look at a sexy person of the appropriate gender, they’re still gonna be sexy. The game is either fun or it isn’t. If it’s fun, it’s kind of cool to be able to see little design elements that might not be obvious and see how they’re working well to make it a good experience. It’s another layer of experiencing the game but for me it doesn’t take away from the enjoyment on the other level.

Fun story, we actually did a partnership with a local school one time and invited a bunch of the kids in to take a look at what we did all day, and for my part of the day’s presentation I made a custom build of the game I happened to be working on which showed a lot of the behind-the-scenes trickery. Like it would pop up little wireframe cubes around all the objects so you could see how this integrated scene was actually made up out of cunningly pasted-together models, or I could fly up and look back down and see how the section of the world that was the path I’d been traveling down was the only part of the world that actually existed and everything outside was just empty. It would show path nodes so that you could see how NPCs running around were following these very defined and limited pathways. It worked perfectly. The kids were super into it and it was like I was a wizard, and kids are naturally attuned to probing the limits and lies of the presented worldview, so they were fascinated. It was super cool.