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Notes -
I wonder what fraction of high school age people have played video games. The way you describe what you want people to do and how you want them to reason are things anyone who has spent any amount of time playing video games has had to do. They are very literally state machines with limited inputs that the player must be able to reason about. The player must be able to reason about what the game will do with further inputs and the context of previously given inputs. Most people playing games don't think about it at this level of abstraction but it seems clear to me that's what's happening.
When you get more fluent with a system, it fits that reasoning process into existing patterns. Learn that moving the mouse corresponds to moving that little cursor, and you can now rely on the same kinesthetic sense that you use for any manipulation. You can skip the slow reasoning step. You will skip it, and you’ll use that cognitive power for the underlying task.
A system which is really clever about this, and makes the intuition easy and painless? We call that good UX.
I think it’s very possible to learn a game and skip right over the explicit reasoning. Especially if
All of which apply to, say, the Xbox Live or (vanilla) Minecraft server modes of play. Barrier to entry is not usually a design goal. When it is, and you get a niche game like NetHack or Aurora 4X…yeah, I’d expect those players would make good programmers. But hey, correlation != causation.
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