What might it mean to situate games like Shenzhen I/O inside pro environments like an IDE?

How far can you break down the wall between the Enacted experience and professional practice? (Powerful enabling environments focus on expert use)

Shenzhen I/O is essentially a series of programming puzzles. It takes place in an artificial development environment, created for the purposes of the game. Could you instead situate those same interactions and lessons inside a professional IDE?

Would the intrinsically meaningful purpose for the interactions remain puzzle-based? Or would this be an opportunity to motivate those interactions by the user’s actual problems, more akin to Y Combinator? If so, would this become a more powerful opportunity because of Deep understanding requires (and is a result of) intense personal connection?

Figma actually did this, on a small scale: Figma’s copy and paste playground situates instructional media inside the context of use. See also Unity Microgames

Some discussion on this in Dynamic mediums usually lack an authored time dimension.


References

Conversation with Jonathan Blow, 2019-09-28