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For a while now I've fantasised about having the ability to relive my life in any place and time. Basically having the ability to experience almost anything from world history. There are some grandiose things I'd like to experience, like being part of the team that put a man on the moon, or being part of the D day landings. However the main thing I would like to experience is far more modest. I'd like to have been a game dev in the early 90s.
As a software developer I've always been curious about game development and have made my own little game demos from time to time. But the one thing that has always annoyed me is that by the time I was old enough and proficient enough to be a game developer the tech had moved on to the stage where consoles were in many ways just the same as regular PCs. You basically had a CPU that ran compiled C++ pretty quickly and you had a GPU that shifted triangles.
The era that I would have loved to have been involved in was the era just before that. I'd love to have cut my teeth writing assembler for the Mega Drive or SNES. To have been involved with the making of a major title for one of the those platforms would have been fantastic. It felt like there was a still a real hacker spirit to it. Trying to squeeze the most out of weird hardware that was full of quirks. I don't particularly have any creative talent when it comes to art/music but I think I could have done some really interesting engine work on those platforms.
Then after that you had the work on Playstation, Saturn and N64. I remember reading articles about the teams that built Crash Bandicoot and Tomb Raider. Stories of all night hackathons and the team basically living/working out of a big house together then heading down to the pub after a long week making some of the first 3D engines. God I would love to have been a part of that.
I've dabbled with learning some Z80 and have made a simple demo of a game engine for the Master System. Unfortunately I'm finding making time for working on stuff like that more and more difficult as I get older. By the time I've finished getting through the work I need to do each week for my own business there is very little energy left for working on hobby projects. Particularly hobby projects that will need years of effort and money to turn in to anything that anybody would want to play. Still, I keep open in the back of my mind that if I can ever manage to make myself less employed I'll try to find a team making something interesting and offer my services.
Soylentils, if you could live your life in another time and place where would you go and what would you want to do?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2020, @11:17AM
Use a time machine, bring advanced Star Trek level or better technologies, like an artilect and automated production tech. Find a civilization, elevate their status while ruling forever as a GOD KING. This would create a new time line. You could turn the Mayans or any civilization of your choosing into a Wakandan paradise, and even conquer the whole planet and move directly to colonize space.
Or you could go back and make games for Sega Saturn, idk lol.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday June 16 2020, @12:17PM (7 children)
D-Day? Really? A zergling rush may be effective but it's not going to be any fun at all if you're one of the zerglings. I'm as pro-soldering a person as you're likely to run into but that'd be the absolute last day I'd pick.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2020, @01:25PM
This is a fantasy--he wants to be on Eisenhower's staff, not on a landing craft...
I worked at Atari Coin-Op in the mid-80s, helping them get realistic physics models running. We had a good boss who kept the upper management away from our projects, this made a lot of things go smoothly for the ~6 people in our group. Outside that, the place was very cold--multiple game development groups were all walled off from each other, card key security (separate code for each of dozens of groups) meant that there was very little socializing or cross-pollination between different projects. I guessed (never knew for sure) that there had been so many problems with game piracy that upper management compartmentalized things this way to limit the damage when one product was compromised. The other thing that was annoying is the bonus policy (based on sales of the games from each dev group) was always being messed with by upper management, the equivalent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday June 16 2020, @03:29PM (5 children)
Call of Duty World at War, the original one, was actually pretty good at showing just how awful that war was from a soldier's perspective. They built-up the atmosphere and used what I believe was actual footage from the time period. If it wasn't, it sure looked like the actual black and white films from the war.
There's nothing stopping him from writing games in assembler, or developing any game he feels like. I don't see why it would be much different now from back then.
The people that created epic games like X-COM:UFO Defense, Civilization II, Master of Magic, Might and Magic, Zelda, Super Mario Brothers, Doom, Duke Nukem, PAC-Man, etc. weren't mythical human beings. They were just dudes / gals, that were doing their jobs, for the most part, some of them enjoyed it, others might not have. I'm thinking the OP would be pretty disappointed with the reality of said events.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2020, @05:41PM (4 children)
Not sure about all of those but games like Doom definitely wasn't just some guy doing his job. John Carmack inspired an entire generation of people, myself among them.
The thing that kind of sucks about real life is that there's no way to measure people, but in many things such as chess there are. And the weird thing about reality is that not only are we not all not even roughly equal, but we're just stupidly brokenly distributed. In chess you regularly have things like the #1 guy be on top for many years. In some cases it's been decades. The best human is somehow just that much better than the second best human alive. And then the exact same is often true for the second best human over the third best. And then the top 10 tend to be just light years away from the top 100 and so on. It's just weird and makes no sense at all.
And I think there's 0 reason to expect this trend doesn't follow in most mental things in life. I restrict it to mental simply because your mind tends to decline much more slowly than your body for those on the top echelon of either sort of endeavor. The point I make here is that there are indeed 'mythical human beings'. And people like Carmack was no doubt a phenom in every single way. Right time, right field, right everything. When something didn't work correctly in one of his programs, he would contact the hardware vendors informing them they must have a bug in the drivers (or even worse - hardware). And they would listen, because he was invariably right.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday June 17 2020, @04:01PM (3 children)
What I'm saying is, John Carmack couldn't have know that what he was working on would become the thing it did. As in, there's no way he could have predicted that it would become a cult classic and that a major Hollywood film would be based on the premise of his game. Sure, he may have worked towards it and all, but I don't think even he had a clue. Just look at the story of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. They may have hoped that they were working on something great, but the massiveness that is Apple today, couldn't have been fathomed from the beginning. Hoped for, perhaps, but what that hoped for future would look like, not a clue.
So, what I'm saying is, do something you have a passion for, whether it's game making, story writing, etc. You might have a bigger impact than you know. Just so long as it's not murdering people or whatever . . . 'cause then it'd be best to not act on those urges.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @05:20PM (2 children)
I'm 100% positive Carmack knew what he was working on would create a revolution. I don't think you understand what he did. Before Carmack there was no such thing as the 3d shooter. He literally invented the genre. And he carried it forward from its early pretty primitive fixed perspective raytracing stuff all the way to completely modern stuff. At the same time he was doing this he was basically directing every single graphics hardware company out there. He was fixing their stuff and simultaneously setting benchmarks for them by creating extremely optimized games that literally could not run on hardware that existed when he made them. Carmack effectively invented modern computer graphics, which are now used in everything.
This sort of mentality is no doubt why he also jumped into rocketry. He knew space was the next big thing for humanity and what existed wasn't cutting it. But he didn't have the same knack for space that he did for software. For that we enter into another 'mythical man'. You can also see this when he jumped into VR which I, and no doubt he, still thinks will eventually dominate the world's entertainment - even if it keeps stumbling for now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @06:27PM (1 child)
I could care less about VR gaming, but AR computing really excites me.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday June 17 2020, @06:37PM
*couldn't
Hybrid flat VR/AR glasses would be nice.
VR has a clear path forward and is slowly improving. AR glasses haven't been marketed to consumers much. Maybe Apple will do it. [roadtovr.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Tuesday June 16 2020, @02:21PM
I've occasionally thought it might be fun to collaborate with scientists, inventors, or engineers from the past while feeding them knowledge of the future to accelerate their progress. One scenario would be going back to 1980 and riding the computing revolution with this unfair advantage. Going 19th century and trying to reinvent electronics, household appliances, and cars could also be interesting.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2020, @02:26PM (4 children)
To September 19, 1998 and stop myself from blowing through a red light on a *bicycle*, striking and causing a 77 year-old woman to smash her head on the pavement (I can still hear her skull fracturing as it slammed into the street -- it's a *very* distinctive sound), then fall into a coma and die seven months later.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @01:04AM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @02:42PM
AC you replied to here.
I have. It was quite a while that I thought about it every single day. Especially after I found out that the woman died.
But I've moved on with my life in the ensuing 20+ years. There are only two things I've done in my life that I'd give almost anything to change, and that moment on a Saturday afternoon on Broadway and 50th Street is one of them.
In truth, at the time, I didn't realize what that sound was that I heard as the woman fell. It was pretty loud, but I didn't recognize it then. When I finally did, I was sickened by it. I hope you've never heard that sound and I hope you never do.
I thought about that poor woman. I thought about her family (my own father had died a few months before the event, after an 18 month battle with lung cancer) and grieved for them.
It's been a long time since I've thought about this every day, or even every month. And while the journal entry was quite positive, I couldn't help but think that was something I'd like to again, with different results.
Your kind thoughts are much appreciated. Thank you.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday June 17 2020, @12:28PM (1 child)
you win a prize for max emotional jolt from minimum word count.
A nurse once told me her worst ER story, a couple had been brought in after hitting a deer and were taken to different rooms.
They had been married 50 years.
The woman had an antler through her body and died, the man woke up and learned his wife was dead.
She could not get the sound of the man's cry out of her head.
And I cant forget the mere imagination of that sound.
Now I wont forget the imagination of the sound you had to hear, and how rather than any utopic scenario you could imagine, you would rather this not have happened to you.
A better definition of empathy and the human capacity to feel for another person, and to feel remorse, I could hardly imagine.
There are people out there who do not have this, who would have simply forgotten about it or laughed it off, or said "everything happens for a reason", or "karma is a bitch."
You and I and the nurse are living the real lives, we shouldn't concern ourselves much with the values of those not like us, and we should for our own protection see the heartless as a different species.
I might have more concern for the deer dying than I would have for someone who had no empathy for the deer.
But how would I handle this? What could I say to put balm on such a wound?(that I know would shatter me too)
Accidents happen. We make mistakes. Sometimes the results are wildly disproportionate.
If there are no gods, if there is no life after death, we should imagine it for our own good as an exercise.
And the exercise is, you sit before the judge and your heart is weighed against a feather, and before he sets the weight free, you are asked one question:
"do you have anything you want to get off your chest before I let the scale decide?"
And that is when you tell this story, and if you do I think you will be ok when they push you through the door to whatever is next.
Watch "American Gods" if you havent, a lot of good stuff in there.
Thanks for sharing, I hope this helps.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @02:32PM
Read the novel [wikipedia.org]. I've done both and while the TV show is good, the novel is much, much better.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2020, @05:22PM (3 children)
Isn't it such an remarkably interesting coincidence that we live at a time that's so unique in two very critical ways:
1) It is the first time in history where we are collecting enough data that, if not destroyed, it will enable future generations to have an incredible degree of insight into our lives, views, values, interests, and more. The NSA is collecting data on the order of exabytes that will deliver an incredibly intimate view of everything we ever do online which, increasingly, is a large chunk of our entire life. Run it through a sophisticated processing system and you could even create a passable simulation of current times, for the first time ever. And we are living in that time.
2) We live in a time when sooo much is happening: birth of the internet, widespread adoption of the microcomputer, the advent of humanity becoming a multiplanetary species, an inflection point in geopolitical power shifts, and so much more. This is not normal. Most people, even during times of relatively rapid change, did not really see the world change all that much during their lifetimes. Now I'm not even 40 years old and I know I lived in a world before the internet, yet nonetheless it feels like a different world altogether given the rapidity of change.
These coincidences alongside the mathematical argument for such tend to make me lean towards the simulation hypothesis. The mathematical argument being quite simple. If we reach a point, ever, where any civilization can create a simulation that is sufficiently compelling as a reality for those without any knowledge to the contrary then we now effectively have 2 realities: one real and one simulated. As time passes and civilizations evolve and technologies develop the number of simulations is going to increase to some number that's impossible to even imagine other than 'big'. And so your odds of being in the 'real reality' approach 1/n where n is some unknown number but probably pretty big. In other words you become much more likely to be in a simulation than in a reality. So we are in the one real reality at one specific time or in an potentially very large number of possible simulations that could be happening at any point in time. Seems difficult to argue that reality being real is the most probable scenario. Best argument against it is the paradox it implies. Imagine you die, wake up and find out it was all a simulation after all. Well the exact same argument still holds true. That's kind of problematic. Somewhat like a never ending Russian Doll. Your odds of being in the real reality should increase as each layer is removed, but they don't seem to.
Anyhow, I think now would probably be one of the most important and educational times. So many events are happening now that will likely stick with us for thousands of years. The most undoubted there being the advent of multiplanetary life and the birth of the internet. I could think of nothing more educational than watching this all unfold. Also explains why (1) so many people seem to be little more than NPCs in terms of cognitive expression and (2) the consciousness paradox: why we obviously observe ourselves and feel as though we are responsible for our own actions, yet equally obviously probably have very little actual control of what's happening. Prod our brain in this way or change our electrochemical balance that way and we become entirely different people. Our independence is probably more a facade than not. But if so then we are "we", whatever is inside of us observing all of this, actually here? Because we're at the movies, baby!
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2020, @07:40PM (1 child)
If this is what outside-the-simulation me does for fun, he's fucked in the head.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @04:27AM
Hahahah, I mean I think a lot of people intuitively think this, but actually think about what paradise or anything even vaguely resembling it would be like. Having whatever you want, whenever you want with not a concern in the world sounds absolutely amazing at first. Until you start to think then what would be the purpose of living? Look at the ultra wealthy and you tend to see two types. The first are your Jeff Bezos' who continues to work 60 hour weeks even though it has no real purpose. He could buy a mansion a day for the rest of his life and not even begin to scratch into his wealth. So they tend to turn to things that are far bigger than they are, like getting humans into space. The other side of the ultra wealthy are the Waltons such as Alice Walton. An alcoholic and complete loser. The same is true of many types in Hollywood who don't have the same scale of money, but still absurdly large amounts of it. They invariably turn to drugs and degeneracy, little different than a smack addicted junky. The sort of things that people use to try to escape the present.
Or look at the games you've played and enjoyed most throughout your life. If you've ever put a lot of hours into a game, it probably was challenging - often times brutally challenging. What we want and what we think we want are often two very different things.
Beyond this there are also other reasons you might simulate 'now.' The obvious one would be education. Such a critical time in history and you will have a relatively in depth understanding of it and how things went, and possibly even went wrong! It also can help teach values in life. For instance I, I think like most all young people, used to be extremely liberal. As I saw what can happen when such types go too far, it pushed me in the other way. When you're young you always hear about people becoming more conservative as they grow older and I always thought 'yeah, if that happens to me - shoot me'. Please don't, I'm quite happy with my views and values now. ;-) But these are things that really you cannot learn through anyway except through experience and lived wisdom. Wouldn't it be nice if this didn't take decades, but could instead happen in a matter of minutes? The amount of time you perceive to be passing is not necessarily how much time is "really" passing.
It could even be a test. One reason that even though I'm not religious I tend to hold to a code of values not so different from a religion. I mean that's inherently a good thing to do, but the notion that your life could be little more than a 'quiz' also further encourages it. Especially given that we live in such a time that staying true to oneself can be very difficult to do.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday June 17 2020, @12:42PM
Compatabilists: It does not matter if the universe or simulation is deterministic if we ourselves must experience it subjectively. the knowledge of the mechanical nature of everything does not help us any more than knowing the weather on a distant planet in a distant galaxy, we only experience the weather on our planet it our galaxy because we are here and that is what we are. (this is me fwiw)
determinists: BUT IT IS STILL ALL MECHANICAL YOU ARE A MACHINE GET IT THROUGH YOUR HEAD NOTHING MATTERS IT IS ALL AUTOMATIC (these people make me laugh)
free will: there is nothing more detrimental to my ability to function as a being and experience life than thinking I am automatic and my decisions are meaningless, and if the knowledge of determinism is just as debilitating as being hit in the head with a sledge hammer, then what use is your philosophical jargon to me if I am sleeping with your girlfriend tonight while you twiddle your thumbs refusing to play because you are above all of this meaningless "intricacies of life"? (i do not see much difference between these people and the compatabilits)
Are we in a simulation? This entire post is like a lure for psych trolling for future simulation creations, like this is what the NSA or simulation operator would do if it wanted to get random high IQ people to reveal their innermost fantasies for their database.
So maybe I am not willing to divulge the inner workings of my brain for free at this time, in this setting, under these conditions.
I will say this, it is impossible for someone or something to run a simulatiion without revealing their true values, and to torture someone in a simulation is outright evil.
Have you watched The Cube trilogy of films? I think you might like them. Send me some btc youngin if you find this valuable, I could use it.
(which is also to say, for all of the vaunted new economy jargon of the crypto enthusiasts, they sure are using their crypto exactly like the old school central bankers, to horde and make propaganda to hype their own assets, rather THAN ACTUALLY MAKING OTHER ASPECTS OF A NEW ECONOMY. And this is one of the things that makes the world feel like a simulation to me.....incongruity of values amidst simplification into more discrete operations....)
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2020, @07:46PM (1 child)
I read this as "... the ability to relieve myself in any place and time."
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday June 17 2020, @12:46PM
If I could pee on anyone who would I pee on, is a definite subset of simulation theory.
Reminds me a little bit of "ow my balls" from idiocracy. You can do anything you want but this is what you choose.
I can see sport in this though. Some time traveling urinationist, reported throughout history as ruining some of the worst moments in history.
"The mystery time travelling pisser has appeared many times, the crowning of nero, burning of the library of alexandria, the release of both windows vista and windows 10...."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NickM on Wednesday June 17 2020, @01:47AM (4 children)
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @12:08PM
> I would like to be a sound engineer at Woodstock.
Nice fantasy, but I strongly suspect that actual job included a lot of yelling by the promoters and band managers when things didn't go as planned/desired (and being on the receiving end of yelling isn't my idea of a good time).
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday June 17 2020, @12:48PM
Thank you for this, maybe we would get along.
Look me up if you are bored or think the same.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday June 17 2020, @06:42PM (1 child)
Why live in the past? Join the chemputer [twitter.com] revolution before it gets locked down.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by NickM on Wednesday June 17 2020, @08:54PM
I was about to awnser: "Only To answer the question" but I have just realized that the question at the end of that journal entry doesn't exclude the present nor the future.
I like the present, it's an interesting time that feels like an inflection point; therefore I would assuredly not want to irreversibly travel in time.
Also I must says that the chemputer looks mighty cool !
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday June 17 2020, @12:53PM
I long for a time when there are simply fewer people and mating is workable, aka romantic.
Robinsons Crusoe, Star Trek TNG, time and place doesnt really matter.
We live in a profoundly unromantic time and a crowded one, this is ultimately grating on human nature not unlike the results of the "mouse utopia" experiment.
That said I do not think it is healthy for anyone to long for a simulation or unreality, and the true test of strength and human value is your ability to keep your head on straight in reality, no matter what it is.
"only the wicked fear death" - somebody