Game developers and players aren’t organically aligned. What is easy to code isn’t always hard to avoid and what is hard to code isn’t always easy to appreciate. Development difficulty and player experience are not related.

For example, a player may spend 30 minutes trying to avoid Game Over in Tetris when the following lines make Game Over happen:

[game lose]; // fire the game over screen
gameRunning = FALSE; // set our game state variable in case of clean up
return; // return and basically exit loop

Three lines or less is really what fires and controls the player experience. Whereas boundary checking, animation tweening and AI is much more difficult. So really the code work doesn’t align with the game play. This is important because nothing is built-in to align up the experience of developer to player. Of course there’s no solution. Maybe this disparity can be managed by completely ignoring coding effort. Just because physics took a long time to implement, let’s not create a physics playground level. Just because an animation was hard, let’s not reuse animations everywhere.

30 minutes of player effort to avoid 3 seconds of coding effort. Ignore it.