I don't disagree with the article, but I also don't know that pushing the boundaries of interactivity and "fun" are relegated to academia. Iterating on what makes things fun is (probably) highly unscientific and might be better left to people more focused on it directly, such as game programmers.

As far as interactive development of games goes, I still marvel at Bruce Hauman's demo[1] of "Interactive programming Flappy Bird in ClojureScript". I think the best hope of achieving what the author is suggesting is in the development of something similar, either direct REPL access to the game environment or DSLs embedded in the game engines (which already exist I'm sure). Outside of the big name engines, I'm curious about what existing options are (leaving out anything browser based because JavaScript is an obvious example), I know of LÖVE[2] but I'm not familiar with how "fun" games made in it are.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZjFVdU8VLI [2]: https://love2d.org/

I can only speak for myself.

But using the most simple and correct abstraction to solve a problem makes programming much more fun.

For example, components are easier to work with than MVC.

Or reactive programming made taming realtime data streams much easier for me, than imperative programming.