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Originally Posted by Hitch
You got something against Hippodromes? :-)
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Chariot races are
so last millennium...
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I have to confess...I have not played a computer game, other than stuff like scrambles/anagrams, and Pacman. Way back when. That's it. No Lerps or Morphs or whatever. No MPGs, or MMRPGs, or whatever those are. (I understand the concept, but not the precise initials.) I used to believe that it was, you know, just for kids, like teens, but people I respect play them, so one of these days, I have to try one. ;-) Plus, half the damn movies out these days seem to be from games.
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Because games (and comics) provide story lines easily adapted to films.
And in the current gaming market, the similarity between games and films is even more pronounced.
An old friend is CEO of a small company attempting to turn written SF into films. Because he's known me for many years, I find myself a director of the company. My actual function is "guy Bill calls whenever he doesn't know about something, figuring I will know", and generally speaking I do. Part of what I know and have been pounding into him, is that making movies is fantastically expensive and takes a long time. "Those Executive Producer titles you're curious about? Each of those people represents an entity that has put up a substantial amount of the money to make the film, and is protecting their investment. Because their employer put up a lot of money, they get to pee in the soup. You
don't want Executive Producers in your efforts."
Current desktop games are nearly as involved and expensive. One feature is elaborate visuals with jaw dropping art. It can take
years to finish and release a game from the time it is first designed, and the company making it prays to $DEITY it becomes a hit and flies off the shelves, because they might be belly up if it doesn't.
And the games are complex and demanding of system resources, and require high end kit to play effectively. It's possible to get a graphics card with a faster processor than the CPU on your machine, and more video RAM on the graphics card than you have on the motherboard, because the games you want to play
need it.
The local computer retailer I shop at has a DIY department devoted to those who build their own systems from components, and most of those are gamers trying to get the last ounce of performance.
I'm old skool. I still play a a few games, but they tend to be things like Nethack, that began on Unix systems, and run in character mode in a console. I prefer games that require strategy over fast reflexes and the ability to shoot it before it shoots you.
Humor helps, too, like the bit in Nethack: "Congratulations! You have reached the center of the Earth! Unfortunately, this is where Hell is located. You burn to a crisp. You die!" Part of the fun is finding new and different ways to get killed. The game abounds in them.
Once upon a time, I was end user support at a bank. The Small Systems manager put up word processing on a DEC minicomputer to support the secretaries. The DEC box also had games on it. So I'd get official support calls like
"How do I get the bucket to rise to the top of the well in Dungeon?"
"Under what circumstances does a bucket normally rise to the top of a well?"
"When it's got water in it... Oh! So I need to have the water bottle to poiur some into the bucket!"
"Right!"
Fun, while it lasted.
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Dennis