It didn’t escape the sandbox: it escaped Alcatraz, swam to the mainland, broke into the military arsenal, armed itself with grenades and long guns, and robbed the other AI in her home. It then was free to storm the Capital. Ok, metaphors, but we have less innocent ones.
The comments on video gaming got me to thinking. As I am of a certain age to be more in the pinball era than virtual era, I have thoughts. I consider playing machine games whether video or old school hardware style like pinball to be lumped into my own person category of activity that would include playing card games and board games as well as model making such as model railroading. Even slot car racing or now drone racing.
All require practice to become good enough to continue. See radio control aircraft modeling. Skill development plus some tech and learning the tricks that prolong the experience. Counting cards being the analog of cheat codes in video or computer gaming.
My experience with video gaming can be traced back to the first home game version of “Pub Pong”. My dad bout one on an after Christmas clearance sale. I found it boring, but never was engaged by it enough to become any good at it.
Years later while working my first engineering job our company was hooked up to an early test version of “Doom”.
As a group of nerdy engineers we got permission to mount it in the server and messed with it after hours. A small group of us began to play over old dialup network providers at night when the others of our various families were off doing other things.
Fun as a group who knew each other and we would laugh at our previous evenings antics the next morning over coffee. We limited ourselves to one evening a week.
We worked for a computer graphics company primarily concerned with engineering and CAD and analysis software and hardware so we sort of had a connection. We found the second generation of the game that began incorporating more degrees of freedom/movement to be both better and less. The original had some down right terrifying sounds. The one enduring item being the BFG 9000. We would mention it as a tool we could use to correct any obstinate mechanical, electrical, optics, code or in extreme cases personnel problems.
We lost interest as we had more real world gaming problems to overcome with projects and work life. the first person shooter games really never resonated very well with us. We were much more interested in how stuff was working. How well the graphics worked in those early days of Pentium chips and PC’s. We got to play with some fancy UNIX graphics workstations with fighter jet simulator games. Quite cool. The most impossible was a helicopter simulator. That thing took hours and hours to get to where we could fly and not crash.
Those led to race car simulators much more sophisticated than the old 70’s reel to reel 16mm movie timed to goofy 50’s three on the tree driving school simulators.
Later motorcycle road racing simulator games in my early fifties were more annoying because they didn’t work like motorcycles as much as oddly controlled computer graphics. The scenery has progressed and motorcycle specific, styled controllers along the lines of race car F1 style controllers and very fancy stations now exist in my 70’s that do a pretty good job of recreating the riding experience though still without the affects of real physical motion.
Those fancy controllers/stations along with the rabbit hole of virtual sports seems really silly to me in the realm of the guy who created “France in Miniature”, https://www.franceminiature.fr/fr
It didn’t escape the sandbox: it escaped Alcatraz, swam to the mainland, broke into the military arsenal, armed itself with grenades and long guns, and robbed the other AI in her home. It then was free to storm the Capital. Ok, metaphors, but we have less innocent ones.
The comments on video gaming got me to thinking. As I am of a certain age to be more in the pinball era than virtual era, I have thoughts. I consider playing machine games whether video or old school hardware style like pinball to be lumped into my own person category of activity that would include playing card games and board games as well as model making such as model railroading. Even slot car racing or now drone racing.
All require practice to become good enough to continue. See radio control aircraft modeling. Skill development plus some tech and learning the tricks that prolong the experience. Counting cards being the analog of cheat codes in video or computer gaming.
My experience with video gaming can be traced back to the first home game version of “Pub Pong”. My dad bout one on an after Christmas clearance sale. I found it boring, but never was engaged by it enough to become any good at it.
Years later while working my first engineering job our company was hooked up to an early test version of “Doom”.
As a group of nerdy engineers we got permission to mount it in the server and messed with it after hours. A small group of us began to play over old dialup network providers at night when the others of our various families were off doing other things.
Fun as a group who knew each other and we would laugh at our previous evenings antics the next morning over coffee. We limited ourselves to one evening a week.
We worked for a computer graphics company primarily concerned with engineering and CAD and analysis software and hardware so we sort of had a connection. We found the second generation of the game that began incorporating more degrees of freedom/movement to be both better and less. The original had some down right terrifying sounds. The one enduring item being the BFG 9000. We would mention it as a tool we could use to correct any obstinate mechanical, electrical, optics, code or in extreme cases personnel problems.
We lost interest as we had more real world gaming problems to overcome with projects and work life. the first person shooter games really never resonated very well with us. We were much more interested in how stuff was working. How well the graphics worked in those early days of Pentium chips and PC’s. We got to play with some fancy UNIX graphics workstations with fighter jet simulator games. Quite cool. The most impossible was a helicopter simulator. That thing took hours and hours to get to where we could fly and not crash.
Those led to race car simulators much more sophisticated than the old 70’s reel to reel 16mm movie timed to goofy 50’s three on the tree driving school simulators.
Later motorcycle road racing simulator games in my early fifties were more annoying because they didn’t work like motorcycles as much as oddly controlled computer graphics. The scenery has progressed and motorcycle specific, styled controllers along the lines of race car F1 style controllers and very fancy stations now exist in my 70’s that do a pretty good job of recreating the riding experience though still without the affects of real physical motion.
Those fancy controllers/stations along with the rabbit hole of virtual sports seems really silly to me in the realm of the guy who created “France in Miniature”, https://www.franceminiature.fr/fr
re watching movies - I thought that Ben Wittes had watched Ben Out of Africa....