When I was a kid I absolutely fell in love with games that had as a core feature, the need to understand interconnecting structures. My favorite of all time was Mouse Trap. For the younger crowd out there, this was a very cool board game where you built the mouse trap out of the included plastic pieces as you played, with the end goal to trigger the mouse trap. The fully assembled mouse trap was a Rube Goldberg style invention where one operation triggered the next and the next and so on, until the last step dropped a cage on a little plastic mouse.

Sometimes when I'm programming and I'm reviewing a particularly complex interaction between components and objects, while tracking the flow path mentally, I say to myself "It's a Mouse Trap!" and I wonder if my early addiction to that game and others like it was portent to my becoming a programmer. Another realization I have sometimes when looking at my code is how daunted I feel at the share complexity involved, followed by a darker comedic amazement at my expectation that it will all come together and work.

How about you? Did you find yourself drawn to games that at their heart featured interacting control paths when growing up?

Robert.