Video games are a waste of life

[Pr. Mandrake]

I had this argument once. My position at the time is that it is like an act
of creation that grows and grows with each save. That was back when I
was playing Might & Magic 5, which I went on to complete. Another time,
someone doubted that a game could give me familiarity with projectile
weapons. I had heard of AR-15s long before they showed up in the news.
It helped me gauge the importance of them showing up in massacres.

But usually you just sit there and simmer, mumbling under your breath,
video games are bad. Have at me. I can hold my own. You don't place
them as a part of reality. Go play Antichamber.

[Creon]

In <7a391c28-cbf9-4285...@googlegroups.com>, "Pr.

i prefer EDO, which is an MMO. The Thargoids are invading the bubble
using large subluminal projectiles colloquially known as "stargoids".

And when they arrive in a system, all hell breaks loose. And now there's a
background sim run by AI to track the thargoid's progress in the human-
thargoid war. Frontier Developments is making a bold move, and I for one
like it.

Anyway: So far, no sign of any Guardians. That may be a good
thing. On the other hand, the Guardian-Thargoid war left the Thargoids in
retreat over a million years ago, so naturally it would be nice
to see what kind of weaponry the Guardians have developed
over the last million years. Probably something to counteract the
[SPOILER REDACTED] of the [SPOILER REDACTED] in the
center of a maelstrom.

Finally, to respond to the subject line:
Are novels a "waste of life"?
Are movies a "waste of life"?
Are amusement park "imagineered" rides a "waste of life"?

Video games are interactive fiction, where the mind is
engaged[*] at a level exceeding that of just watching
a movie.

[*] and in the boring parts of a game, people watch youtube anyway lol

--
-Creon

[Pr. Mandrake]

On Tuesday, December 13, 2022 at 12:02:42 AM UTC-6, Creon wrote:

> Video games are interactive fiction, where the mind is
> engaged[*] at a level exceeding that of just watching
> a movie.

In some games, getting to the middle game is almost like getting old.
Wherever you go, you don't want to fall down and break a hip. An error
later in the game usually costs more.

> [*] and in the boring parts of a game, people watch youtube anyway lol

I'm fairly reluctant at looking up secrets. I bought Limbo for a friend and I.
He finished it about two weeks after he got it. I still haven't finished it.
Evidently he looked at youtube quite often. It's not wrong though. Better
to finish a game than be stuck in it for years. However, Limbo's not really
my cup of tea. As a Catholic, it's probably a sin to play it.

[Pr. Mandrake]

> Video games are interactive fiction, where the mind is
> engaged[*] at a level exceeding that of just watching
> a movie.

Getting to the mid game of all these new titles is that the
environment grows into yours. The environment is here
in my apartment.

[Pr. Mandrake]

On Monday, January 16, 2023 at 3:30:24 PM UTC-6, Pr. Mandrake wrote:
> On Tuesday, December 13, 2022 at 12:02:42 AM UTC-6, Creon wrote:
>
> > Video games are interactive fiction, where the mind is
> > engaged[*] at a level exceeding that of just watching
> > a movie.
> In some games, getting to the middle game is almost like getting old.
> Wherever you go, you don't want to fall down and break a hip. An error
> later in the game usually costs more.

This was from one of my failed Wizardry 7 parties. They had pointy
sticks, but not much wizardry (hindsight is 20/20). I got some advice
about starting party. Now I find it difficult to get my ranger's shock
rod out of my mind. it's 2d4 and he often hits twice. It's basically an
upgraded awl pike, with a bonus 1/8 chance of draining the target's
stamina. He stands in the back row with his enormous hit points and
polearms the front two rows. I think you get the idea.

[nikolai kingsley]

thinking fondly about that game I started writing a while ago. based on Keila Jedrik's original position as Senior Liaitor in Frank Herbert's "The Dosadi Experiment". very simple loop of resource allocation, production and a random possibility of an attack from the Rim. it could expand into an entire city-wide strategy game, but I can't remember where the original was. possibly one of the old mainframes at FIT.

--
is there a point to this story, Dad?

I like stories

[nikolai kingsley]

"a while ago" being around 1988.

[entwickeln14]

On Saturday, June 17, 2023 at 8:07:31 PM UTC-4, nikolai kingsley wrote:
> "a while ago" being around 1988.

Hello.
What's new?

e

[vallor]

hi

In 8th grade, I wrote a game on the Commodore PET. You
would maneuver your avatar (an asterisk) through a landscape
of constantly-changing random blocks appearing and disappearing.

Kind of a funky maze game. Would have been around 1981.

--
-v

[entwickeln14]

On Thursday, June 22, 2023 at 5:08:46 PM UTC-4, vallor wrote:
>
> In 8th grade, I wrote a game on the Commodore PET. You
> would maneuver your avatar (an asterisk) through a landscape
> of constantly-changing random blocks appearing and disappearing.
>
> Kind of a funky maze game. Would have been around 1981.

Brian, is that you?

[vallor]

No...

Who is Brian?

--
-v

[nikolai kingsley]

> In 8th grade, I wrote a game on the Commodore PET. You
> would maneuver your avatar (an asterisk) through a landscape
> of constantly-changing random blocks appearing and disappearing.

coding games on eight-bit computers was a Thing for people of our generation, roughly. fond memories of hand coding 6502 machine code to move sections of a map onto screen memory.

--
poke 54272, 0

[entwickeln14]

Brian was in the class ahead of me in high school. He did pretty much the same thing you describe above. It was fun to play with.

[vallor]

I did it all with BASIC, though there was peek-ing and poke-ing
going on, too for the display. It used the numeric keypad
for movement, so I could use the number as an array index for
x-offset and y-offset values, something I figured out to
replace a very slow if-then-else.

But this was all over 40 years ago...no classes, just "here's the
manual, have at it." (I think us kids showed the teachers more than they
showed us.)

That was middle school though. High school, we had a network of
Apple ][+'s on a Corvus hard drive, a whopping 20MB. And a computer
class, where we learned Pascal...but that gave us access to the lab, where
we could play with something called "graForth"...

And there I was, with my dutiful white hat, reading the
book "Beneath Apple DOS" to figure out how to mitigate
a security flaw with the Corvus DOS: one could type
"CATALOG V100", and be instantly transported to the volume
of user 100. I patched it to immediately reboot if someone went
outside of their own volume. This started a bit of an
arms race. Hey, we were kids back then.

--
-v

[entwickeln14]

On Saturday, June 24, 2023 at 3:47:25 AM UTC-4, vallor wrote:

> outside of their own volume. This started a bit of an
> arms race. Hey, we were kids back then.
>

Heh.
Pleased to meet you.
*bows*

[vallor]

Oh, don't bow to me. This world needs more
egalitarianism.

The truth of the matter is that I was totally,
geekily, and neuro-divergently, fascinated
by the _Beneath Apple DOS_ book. It included
instructions on how to patch the RWTS routine
(read/write a track and sector) to plug one's
own subroutine into the OS. It also had, iirc, a completely
commented disassembly of DOS 3.3.

Knowledge is power, and that book was chock full of it.

By then I knew enough 6502 to do annoying things with the
speaker (location $C030), which couldn't be toggled
very fast in BASIC...but 6502 machine language
could make a high-pitched "mosquito buzz" come out of
the speaker. (We had fun with that.)

I still remember the opcode for JMP
was 4C...

obtalkbizarre:
Wonder if I would use the service, if there
was a way to free memory used up by
trivia. Some examples to consider are obsolete
opcodes, speaker memory locations, and John Denver lyrics.

--
-v