I had forgotten we were supposed to write responses on all these articles! Well. Catching up now.

So. I love the way this article starts. With the little girl yelling at the guy in the arcade. Because when I first read the article, I’d been playing Robot Unicorn Attack right before and I’d had some system notification from windows and gotten surprisingly angry. The little notification noise distracted me briefly and I ended up losing a wish (life). Not like it really matters, but it bugged me. And then made me laugh.

Anyway. I love this kid, Jarish. The fact that he’s not just playing the games but actually looking into how they work is awesome.  It reminds me a bit of the times when I’d mess around with the old Need for Speed files. You could go into the program files and find a file that listed all the properties used by the physics engine. By modifying the file you could change things like the cars’ weights and other stuff. I used to play around with those files and see what would happen if I pushed the settings to the extremes.

I also found it interesting to read about the origins of games. I’d read about space wars before, but never thought much about it as far as the development of games.  It’s interesting to me to think that the first computer game was a two player game, since I keep thinking that creating a two player game for this class would be more difficult than creating a single-player game. To play online we’d have to figure out how to set up some sort of server for it and I remember being a little uncomfortable playing two player games in front of one computer (two people on the keyboard or something) back when I was younger.

I like the line, “Not everyone wants to be around the perfect mirror. Some people dislike what they experience as the precision, the unforgivingness of mathematics.” After the section about Jimmy, who finds his own perfection in the game, by finding that 10 minutes slot where he can play the game perfectly, it’s interesting to consider that some people see only their flaws when they play a video game. And it’s in part because the computer does not make mistakes. The programs run purely on mathematical logic, so 8×8 will always ==64. They know that if something is going wrong for them in the game, it’s due to their own failings, because the game is always doing “the game” right. That particular bit is probably what keeps me thinking the most after reading the article.

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