Are questions about programming "within a video game" different from questions about programming "in real life"?

Question

Gaming the system

So, I asked a question over on Meta.SO:

Can I ask about assembly programming in the game “Human Resource Machine”?

...
It is programming, for sure, but I'm unsure about whether it's on-topic because it's not a "problem I face in real life", it's a video game.

And the comments led me to quickly realize there's a more fundamental decision to be made here:

Scratch and TIS-100 are on-topic here, I don't see why this [questions about assembly programming in "Human Resource Machine"] wouldn't be on-topic as long as the question is clear and your "code" is added properly

Should questions about programming within a video game be treated differently than questions about "real life" programming?

Programming for fun and profit

Examples of programming within a video game:

1. Redstone circuits in Minecraft
2. Logic gate assembly in Rocky's Boots
3. Assembly programming in Human Resource Machine

Note that all these "languages" are Turing-complete, but:

1. Proprietary
2. Commercial
3. Difficult to copy/paste for the sake of an MVCE

But I think those are all minor, technical, issues, and we can come up with workarounds (plenty of proprietary, commercial, and even visual languages have active tags on SO, e.g.).

The major difference I see is such languages do not represent "actual problems" that, for example, the SO tour asks for, in the "it matters in real life" sense.

But does this really matter?

You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here

For example, is it true that:

If you write the question [about programming within a given video game] that someone can understand and answer it without buying the game I think you can totally ask that question. Now if your code does not work I would ask on SO, while when you have working code and you want to optimize it you probably want to go to codereview.

Just like "regular" programming questions? And, if not, then where are these questions best asked?

For example, since we're talking about video games, and plenty of programmers frequent the site, should we ask them on Arqade?

Or, as another user suggested,

I thought a little about this and I might have an even better idea. You're right that you have something a little too "fun" for Stack Overflow, but maybe a little too technical for Arqade (although you could post there and see if it attracts anything). But there is one site combining both of these realms a little:

Programming Puzzles and Code Golf

If Minecraft is a language, I think HRM counts too.

So it's true that Scratch questions have been asked on SO, and Minecraft redstone answers provided on both Arqade and PPCG. Ideally, if the question is fundamentally about programming in a video-game (i.e. non-practical) language, where should they be directed?

Are the rules the same for video-game languages as for practical languages?

---

_{Full disclosure: my gut tells me programming is programming, as just as we accept homework questions and treat them like any other, despite the difference in their motivations, we should probably do the same for "video game programming".}

_{But I trust the system, and I know StackExchange, as a Q&A site, tries to focus on "practical problems", so I'm happy if the consensus is "nah". That's 100% fine.}

_{If you would prefer "video game programming" questions be excluded from the programming-specific sites, vote down, and ideally suggest a stack, such as Arqade or PPCG, where these should be directed. I want honest feedback, and couldn't care less about rep points.}

Answer 1

I hate the line "must be a practical problem that you face". There are so many problems with it.

1. Who gets to decide whether your problem is "practical" enough?
2. By the as-if rule, why does it matter if you actually face the problem or think that someone else might?
3. If it's a problem that you only think that someone else might, how come self-answered questions that add quality information to the Q&A repository are encouraged?
4. What about language lawyer questions? I can ask a superb question about the C++ standard which will provide extreme value for anyone using the language in any seriousness, and I can do so while deliberately abstracting away what the target platform will end up being in real life. It's entirely irrelevant to the question as to whether I shall be compiling for x86, compiling for a stone tablet, compiling for Minecraft, compiling for my immortal dog to execute bit by bit over the centuries, or not compiling it at all. Nobody's said that language-lawyer questions aren't welcome, so wha?

Unless you're obviously trolling (and it's not 1st April), I don't see why anyone has a right to decide that your question about a programming language is not "good enough" because the implementation of that programming language isn't "real enough" for them. Such people are free to simply move on to another question instead of getting all offended about it.

I think that "must be a practical problem that you face" line is likely to be a deliberate simplification to stop people from posting reams of hypothetical nonsense that doesn't need answering and didn't need asking. But I wouldn't take it too literally.

tl;dr: post it

Answer 2

Lightness Races in Orbit makes some excellent points, but I have a potentially simpler idea.

Is it a programming question?

Programming is programming, regardless of where it is done and for what purpose. The aforementioned Rocky's Boots presents a real programming environment that can be made to do many things but was intended as an educational game to teach programming. That purpose may affect how interesting and useful a question is to other users, but doesn't determine whether it is a programming question. What's the difference between an educational game and and a game? "It's educational" has never been an off-topic reason on Arqade, and so I don't see any reason why "it's a game" should be an off-topic reason on Stack Overflow or any other programming stack.

Stack Overflow currently has several tags for what could be considered "game" languages:

• Minecraft, the scripting language used in various versions of the Minecraft game. (2,347 questions)
• Linden Scripting Language, a proprietary C-like scripting language used to provide functionality in the virtual world of Second Life. (60 questions)
• Scratch, a "toy" programming language in a canned environment designed to teach the basics of loops and conditions. (154 questions)
• Karel, an educational language featuring a minimalistic simulation of a robot and its environment. (32 questions).

In addition, "old" or "obsolete" programming languages are and have always been on-topic on Stack Overflow. For example,

• COBOL (1,331 questions)
• Fortran 77 (539 questions)
• Visual Basic 5.0 (40 questions)
• ALGOL 68 (10 questions)

Programming theoretically doesn't even require a computer, so theoretical or paper-and-pencil languages can still yield programming questions. For example,

• Turing Machines (425 questions)
• Lambda Calculus (518 questions)

It is true that tags for older, less popular, or niche languages do not generally get anywhere near the volume of activity that the most popular tags get, but their questions are not getting closed and many of them are upvoted.

What is not a programming question?

There are some games that have challenges that take inspiration from the world of computers, but are really math, visuospatial, or role-playing puzzles. For example, the 1994 video game Star Trek: The Next Generation: Future's Past included a section in which the player needed to assemble a circuit board to bring the main computer of a starship back on-line, but the puzzle required no actual programming knowledge and was functionally equivalent to a jigsaw puzzle. Asking a question about solving this puzzle would not be considered a programming (or electrical engineering, for that matter) question despite the fact that the game portrayed it as such.