Game logic

How the fuck do they code games so that everything moves smoothly and at a consistent rate regardless of the speed of the machine you run it on, and still have tons of shit interacting with each other somehow?
Maybe I need to find a good open-source candidate to have a look at.

Also, I wish I knew the correct terms to describe what I'm talking about.

>>60
How is it saner? IRC is more compact, more flexible, more secure, easier to scale, considerably more featureful and so on. The only thing twitter has on IRC is being http-based, and that can be interpreted as both good and bad.