system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
eli5 How does pausing in video games work?

What happens when you pause a game? Why are you able to just stop all the work the computer is doing and perfectly able to let it go again? With all the calculations it's doing, especially for 3D games, surely pausing it can mess up something that's in the middle of running.
gpt
>With all the calculations it's doing, especially for 3D games, surely pausing it can mess up something that's in the middle of running.

Why would it? You also can put down your pencil at any point when doing math on a piece of paper and then resume at any time. Same applies to computers.

Fun fact: your computer is actually switching programs it is running at hundreds of times a second, pausing every time to run something else. It will run one program for one hundredth of a second, pause that computation and run another program for another hundredth of a second, and so on to make it seem that all your apps are running at the same time.