system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: The difference between source code, and what we download when we buy a game

I'm not even sure I'm asking this question correctly; that's how far removed I am. I remember reading that someone had found starcraft source code and the internet lost their minds when he turned it in.
gpt
When you write a computer program, you write it using a human readable language, for example C, Java or Python. For example, this is what a basic "Hello world" program (a program that print "hello, world") looks like in C:

    #include <stdio.h>

    main( )
    {
            printf("hello, world\n");
    }

Things like "include", "main" and "printf" are instructions for the computer that tell it what to do. The computer, however, doesn't actually know what this code means. Instead, the code first needs to be translated to "machine code", which the computer does understand, but is very difficult for humans to read and understand. This process is known as "compilation". When you download a game, the game's executable files are already in machine code, after the compilation process was done. This means that you can't really understand how the game works just by looking at the files. However, if you have the original source code, it means that by looking at it you can figure out how exactly it works.