"I don't really care about who made the games I love."

"if I see anything that has the hands of Derek Yu or Edmund McMillen on it, I definitely check it out because I love some of their works"

I think this is ultimately the point. If you know who made the game, it's easier to find other games they made. So if you make an effort to find out who made any game you play, you can find (or avoid!) other games they made.

"Do you ask the names of the people who prepared your Big Mac?"

James Delligatti created it; he cribbed it from the Big Boy double-decker, which is how I found out that Big Boy was an actual thing once upon a time (and still is!). Because it was made by a franchisee and developed for franchising, it's assembled on site, not developed or prepared each time, so it's a poor analogy for a game. So are most dishes off a recipe, unless we're talking about hyperformulaic games like the _Ville series.

"Do you look for the names of the engineers who designed your car?"

I do, but Honda doesn't credit individual designers and engineers in remotely the same way as media companies credit designers/writers/directors/developers/publishers/editors. But the studios themselves and their processes are fascinating. Did you know Honda's advanced design studio is in Los Angeles? Their high-end models are designed in the US.

"Do you care about the people who planted and cultivated the tomato you used for your salad?"

For any vegetable I care, mostly because of the hellish working conditions for most people who plant and cultivate anything (and that's assuming planting or cultivation isn't automated or machined, as many farms, even small ones, do now). But to the more relevant point about the success of the resulting tomato, I care far more about how the farmers developed the genetic background and agricultural process for the variety of tomato used, as that actually has a factor in the flavor. Even within the same batch, each tomato can be radically different, and finding out why helps you select the best tomatoes from the bin at the market.

tl;dr: Learning ANYTHING about ANYTHING makes finding out relevant information easier. Learning ANYTHING about the process behind the things you enjoy is always better than learning nothing.

I agree – it's easy to single people out with indie projects but less fair when you're talking about team efforts. That's why I make us watch the credits, start to finish, every time we beat a game.

But on the other hand, I have very mixed feelings about gatekeeping a kid's ability to play that content based on quizzing him about who made it. Not necessarily because I think the kid shouldn't need to earn access to over-consumed games, but because I'm uncomfortable with the implied singular ownership of the created games for team projects, even if that single person is the game designer or "lead" designer. I keep thinking of the bit in the "Standing in the Shadows of Motown" documentary where Robert White says that he created one of the most instantly recognizable guitar lines of all time but no one knows his name. Like on the one hand, this seems like an amazing first step towards understanding that people make these things, that who does what makes a difference, and that different designers have recognizable concerns and voices. On the other, it seems to presuppose and reinforce a concept of authorship in a team setting that overstates the "singular vision" model of the thing and minimizes the contributions of the rest of the team. That seems offset in your case by your ability to draw back the curtain a bit and show him how the sausage is made, but it still leaves me slightly unsettled.

Really interesting article, thanks for writing it.