Mr. Farley, you are an ass
Dec. 3rd, 2005 03:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ljpliceaseTwo things came up at Thanksgiving dinner this year that I wanted to talk about. One was my "blog" and the other was video games. I prefer to refer to it as a journal, but it is what is, so it is a blog. I sort of defended the existence of my journal by saying that I started it because I wanted to practice writing to keep my skills from decaying. That is actually true, although there is another reason.
I find when I get angry or into an argument, I often become incoherent. It's not that the ideas are unclear to me, in fact, I find just the opposite: the ideas are so clear in my head that I don't stop to explain key points that need to be made. If I take my time and write down my reasoning for a particular position I find that I can be much more persuasive, or at least less nervous if the subject should come up in a conversation. I have strong opinions, but I tend to be non-confrontational.
Take the other subject at dinner: video games. In the 7th grade I wrote an essay about why video games were good that was so coherent and well written that my no-good English teacher Mr. Farley wrongly accused my mother of having written it. My father felt that I spent too much time playing video games and tried to dissuade me from doing so. In the long term he didn't alter my behavior, I think that he was wrong to try, and I don't think that my interest in video games has stunted my personal growth. I hardly play video games at all anymore, but I do not regret the time I invested in them.
At dinner, one of the guests said that video games were bad because you don't use your own imagination. Since I tend to be non-confrontational in person, I didn't contradict the guest. While it is sort of a personal reasoning, and may not be relevant to everyone's experience, I'd like to explain why I disagree here for the record, and so that in the future I have a coherent line of reasoning for arguing the subject.
For me, video games go back much further than just the 7th grade. I first heard about video games when my mother explained to me the principles of Pac-Man. I was probably four or five. I was excited about this new medium, and I knew right then and there that I wanted to make video games. I was inspired early on by Space Invaders to design the game Orange Attack! (which sadly has never been made). Note that my first interest in video games was not to play them (although I have certainly done a lot of that), but to create them.
I did not actually write my first computer game until the summer between 6th and 7th grade. I was visiting my father in Chicago, and he taught me the basics of programming in Fortran. I was pretty bored by this until he showed me how to use a GOTO statement and I made a startling realization: "You could write games with this!"
After that I wrote five somewhat mediocre computer games based on Star Trek and Star Fleet Battles which I called Space Game I-V. Each game was more sophisticated than the last, as my computer skills evolved. I taught myself just about everything that I needed to know about computers. Finally, in my last couple of years in high school, I wrote two graphical adventure games, the Last Sunset and Homeland. They were both fairly sophisticated for the time, and I'm still proud of the work. At about this time, my friend wingated showed me some demos written by Future Crew.
For the uninitiated, a demo is hard to explain.
At that point, several of my friends and I set out to write our own demo. I finally did write a demo (Final Intensity) as a final project in a computer graphics course. To me, this was never much different from my decision in the early 80s to make video games, because on a more fundamental level, my interest was in expressing myself creatively using computers.
I think that it is too easy to dismiss relatively new technology, like computers and video game consoles, as lacking user-level creativity and being a waste of time. Even when I was "just" playing video games, my experiences helped me become comfortable with computers and technology, which has been an enormous benefit to my career as a computer programmer. Beyond that, a computers and video game hardware are a canvas which can be used in an infinite number of ways. Sure, it is true that games like Grand Theft Auto are pretty vile, but Second Reality was so revolutionary, it literally redefined what you could do with a PC. It is unreasonable to condemn such expression in toto, just as it would be unreasonable to condemn all movies, or all television, or all photography, or all of any art form.
I find when I get angry or into an argument, I often become incoherent. It's not that the ideas are unclear to me, in fact, I find just the opposite: the ideas are so clear in my head that I don't stop to explain key points that need to be made. If I take my time and write down my reasoning for a particular position I find that I can be much more persuasive, or at least less nervous if the subject should come up in a conversation. I have strong opinions, but I tend to be non-confrontational.
Take the other subject at dinner: video games. In the 7th grade I wrote an essay about why video games were good that was so coherent and well written that my no-good English teacher Mr. Farley wrongly accused my mother of having written it. My father felt that I spent too much time playing video games and tried to dissuade me from doing so. In the long term he didn't alter my behavior, I think that he was wrong to try, and I don't think that my interest in video games has stunted my personal growth. I hardly play video games at all anymore, but I do not regret the time I invested in them.
At dinner, one of the guests said that video games were bad because you don't use your own imagination. Since I tend to be non-confrontational in person, I didn't contradict the guest. While it is sort of a personal reasoning, and may not be relevant to everyone's experience, I'd like to explain why I disagree here for the record, and so that in the future I have a coherent line of reasoning for arguing the subject.
For me, video games go back much further than just the 7th grade. I first heard about video games when my mother explained to me the principles of Pac-Man. I was probably four or five. I was excited about this new medium, and I knew right then and there that I wanted to make video games. I was inspired early on by Space Invaders to design the game Orange Attack! (which sadly has never been made). Note that my first interest in video games was not to play them (although I have certainly done a lot of that), but to create them.
I did not actually write my first computer game until the summer between 6th and 7th grade. I was visiting my father in Chicago, and he taught me the basics of programming in Fortran. I was pretty bored by this until he showed me how to use a GOTO statement and I made a startling realization: "You could write games with this!"
After that I wrote five somewhat mediocre computer games based on Star Trek and Star Fleet Battles which I called Space Game I-V. Each game was more sophisticated than the last, as my computer skills evolved. I taught myself just about everything that I needed to know about computers. Finally, in my last couple of years in high school, I wrote two graphical adventure games, the Last Sunset and Homeland. They were both fairly sophisticated for the time, and I'm still proud of the work. At about this time, my friend wingated showed me some demos written by Future Crew.
For the uninitiated, a demo is hard to explain.
A demo is a way for demosceners to demonstrate their abilities in programming ("code"), music ("zik"), drawing ("gfx"), and/or 3D modeling. It is a kind of non-interactive multimedia presentation, the difference with a classical animation being that the display of a demo is computed in real time (like people performing a play compared to showing a movie), making computing power considerations the biggest challenge.In short, a demo is a form of artistic expression, using a computer (or even a game console) as its medium.
Wikipedia
At that point, several of my friends and I set out to write our own demo. I finally did write a demo (Final Intensity) as a final project in a computer graphics course. To me, this was never much different from my decision in the early 80s to make video games, because on a more fundamental level, my interest was in expressing myself creatively using computers.
I think that it is too easy to dismiss relatively new technology, like computers and video game consoles, as lacking user-level creativity and being a waste of time. Even when I was "just" playing video games, my experiences helped me become comfortable with computers and technology, which has been an enormous benefit to my career as a computer programmer. Beyond that, a computers and video game hardware are a canvas which can be used in an infinite number of ways. Sure, it is true that games like Grand Theft Auto are pretty vile, but Second Reality was so revolutionary, it literally redefined what you could do with a PC. It is unreasonable to condemn such expression in toto, just as it would be unreasonable to condemn all movies, or all television, or all photography, or all of any art form.
