Long before Walker Forrester wrote his first line of JavaScript at the Georgia Tech coding boot camp, he was holding a controller. The games he grew up with are mostly PlayStation classics, and looking at them side by side, they have something in common: every one of them is a carefully built system.
The shelf
Crash Bandicoot (Naughty Dog, 1996). A run-forward platformer on the original PlayStation, built on tight jumps, breakable crates and boss fights. Every level is a short obstacle course with a clear goal.
Jak and Daxter (Naughty Dog, 2001). An action platformer on PlayStation 2 known for its big, connected world that loads as you play, with almost no loading screens between areas. For its time, that was a technical feat.
Ratchet & Clank (Insomniac Games, 2002). Planet-hopping action built around gadgets and weapons that you collect and upgrade as you go.
Sly Cooper (Sucker Punch, 2002). A raccoon master thief and his crew pulling off cel-shaded heists. It rewards sneaking, timing and patience over brute force.
SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs (Zipper Interactive, 2002). A tactical third-person shooter on PlayStation 2 in which you lead a four-man SEAL team. It came with a USB headset so players could give voice commands to their squad, and it was one of the first big online games on the console.
Uncharted (Naughty Dog, 2007). Treasure hunter Nathan Drake climbing, solving puzzles and surviving set pieces that play like an action movie.
Call of Duty (series since 2003). The long-running first-person shooter series, started by Infinity Ward in 2003 and played across PC and consoles.
Three of those seven came from the same studio, Naughty Dog.
What these games teach a builder
You don't have to be a game designer to learn from games. Anyone who has played a good platformer has absorbed a few lessons about how well-made systems work.
Clear rules. In Crash Bandicoot you know what a crate does, what an enemy does and what happens if you miss a jump. Good software works the same way. People should be able to predict what a button will do before they press it.
Fast feedback. Good games tell you right away when you've done something right or wrong. A sound, a flash, a checkpoint. A good web app does the same: a form that says what's missing, a page that shows something is loading.
Difficulty that builds. The best levels start easy and add one new idea at a time. That's also how good software gets built: one feature, test it, then the next.
Upgrades and progression. Ratchet & Clank is built around getting better tools as you go. Learning to code is a lot like that. Each new skill, from HTML to databases to React, unlocks things you couldn't build before.
Many ways to solve a problem. Sly Cooper rewards the player who studies a level before charging in. Developers spend much of their time doing exactly that: reading the problem, planning a route, then executing.
From player to builder
At the Georgia Tech coding boot camp, Walker went from playing well-built systems to building his own. He made a farmers market finder, a coworker matching app, online stores and his first mobile app. Each of those projects has its own rules, feedback and progression, just on a smaller scale than a PlayStation classic.
Gaming gets a bad rap sometimes as wasted time. But for a lot of people who build things, the games they grew up with were their first lesson in what "well-made" feels like. Walker's shelf is full of them.