Probably depends on the game you play. I like to hack on some code while waiting for groups to form in MMOs for example. And I'm not building 10 million lines

Probably depends on the game you play. I like to hack on some code while waiting for groups to form in MMOs for example. And I'm not building 10 million lines of C++ on the side. For moderate sized apps (<100k LoC) in higher level languages (JS, Java, Python), building and/or running the code is mostly unaffected. While actually going through the code with grep or ag, cloning repos, reviewing PRs, making a commit, those aren't super CPU intensive. And well, my gaming machine is so far beyond the macbook pros my employer provides, it's still going to be faster by a factor, game or not. Lastly, even if there was a significant perf impact, being able to close the game and immediately fire up a terminal is still a lot better context switching experience than having to go through a reboot cycle.