[PLUG] Games and Linux and Life

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Sun, Nov 05, 2006 at 08:58:27PM -0800, Chris Genly wrote:
...
> And of course the problem we are all aware of with games is that
> manufacturers write for windows and don't give a care for linux.
...

Games.  One of the reasons I run Linux is that I have a semi-
addictive personality, and games would suck up entirely too much
of my life that I would rather use productively.  There are just
too many positive things that I can do, and need doing, and not
enough hours to do them in.   So games get erased on my machines,
and if the urge becomes overpowering I actually firewall off some
game websites so I can resist temptation.

Most of you are younger than me, and grew up with computer and
video games, and perhaps some of you have spent thousands of hours
on them.  So how does the thrill of winning a video game compare
to completing a small program, or finding a bug, or building a
cabinet, or playing music with friends, or some other small task
with a defined result?  Does game playing scratch the same itch?
For me, game playing is almost self-destructive, it is the 
internal brat fighting against the outwardly successful adult.

The one gamelike addiction I permit myself is Sudoku puzzles out
of the paper, but even there it was more satisfying to write a
solver in Perl (which has solved every puzzle so far, though a
16x16 5 star from the Oregonian takes almost a minute to solve
by machine, and hours by hand).  Still, that is time taken away
from other things.

The reason there are so few games for Linux may be because Linux,
and creativity in general, are much more engaging games.  Perhaps
if we developed some game-like debugging tools, then the young
folk spending kilo-hours looking for monsters in mazes could be
looking for buffer overflows instead.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs