[gibspaulding]

You see this a lot in gaming too. There are entire sites, devoted to figuring out what various weapon attachments actually do in Call of Duty. If you poke around the Minecraft wiki you'll find the same thing - people working out exactly how fast you can move with different potion effects or how scaling works when leveling up enchantments.

Theoretically, all of this information could be found in the source code, but without it gamers are left to an endless research project.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I'm not convinced that having the source code is necessarily a perfect shortcut to accurate results. Video games, in particular, seem to be subject to a decent amount of emergent behaviors such that scientifically measuring things is honestly probably a better option than trying to read the source code to find out what the developer thinks should happen.

[spijdar]

At least in the case of gaming, I think (some) people actually enjoy this aspect. It's a waste in a lot of systems, but in an "art", I think it can elevate the experience, at least for certain games and genres.

An interesting inverse of the norm is the Roguelike ADOM. Most similar games from the same time period like Angband, Nethack, and DCSS were open source, while ADOM was a free, but proprietary game. The other games' secrets were open-book, with no real secrets to speak of as the source code is scoured by players. ADOM remains sort of interesting to me as there are red herrings in even the machine code to throw off reverse engineering, and genuine secrets that open source games simply can't have. I've always appreciated that you can't simply look at the source to know everything, anyway.

[gibspaulding]

You are certainly right, there's a certain appeal to the mystery!

I remember reading an article on the Minecraft wiki about how to achieve the slowest possible movement, which is of course a totally useless thing to do in game, but you could see someone had put a ton of thought into working out how to do it! And who's to say that your slow machine is less an expression of artistry than playing the game "right" and building castles!

[LegionMammal978]

Minecraft at least is effectively open source; however, many of the quantities being measured are indirect consequences of the physics engine which would be difficult to derive from the constants in the code.