Games and Online Entertainment

Where else could the combination of technology and creativity be more prominent than in the game and entertainment industries. Atari video games have evolved to network (wireless network in the case of the new sleek Nintendo DS lite) interaction and collaborative play. Movies and for that matter all digital content; video, audio will soon be delivered either through fiber optic Internet or wireless Internet. Apple computer seems to be the leader in this area, rapidly getting the public used to the concept of digital music delivered like it was never delivered before and now just as rapidly into the age of network based media management. All of these things are enriching our lives beyond what we imagined. I hate to keep this particular discussion so confined to one particular vendor. However, having used what little media software Windows XP has introduced as native tools, i.e. media player, movie maker etc. The comparisons to iLife is, well... not really important. It is important though to recognize that some companies are incredibly focused on where the future lies. It's developing the software technologies on a journey towards ultimate enlightenment. For instance how would I function tomorrow without Google? I also wonder how many lines of code went into the games we played in the 80's compared to the 3D games of today for the Xbox 360.

I began programming by writing my first "game" on my Commodore Vic-20. I put that in quotes because the intention was to create a game, although the only interactivity was to press 2 keys to control a starship, up and down as the flying part was automatic. Of course each version would add increments of improvements in display and play. Having worked in IT for over 15 years, I will honestly admit it was difficult to program in Cobol and Fortran in those early years. And now with the advent of Java, I still struggle a bit. But until recently, I had lost sight of that motivator; the desire to be creative. The creative drive absolutely was the driving force that got that starship looking as cool as possible although very pixelated by today's standards. Business process requirements for a new order entry system took some of that creativity out of the picture as I stared for days at green text against a black screen. How much more productive could I have been or how better an application could that Cobol program have been if there was an element of, shall we say "game" aspect to that Cobol program? If I started out with a difficult challenge of writing an Eliza program in Cobol, elements of that successful code could have enhanced the Order Entry application. Maybe people could interact with the OE system that was a bit like a game, with certain qualities of good design, thorough planning, object oriented thinking, some AI thrown in...who knows how that program would have turned out.

But of course those progrmming languages have evolved to adopt those things I mentioned as we learned to think in more complex and "creative" ways. Btw, I will appologize now for the overuse of the word; "creative". I'm fascinated by the concept of code development. Does anyone know how much code was written to land the Lunar module on the moon? The code that runs the aging Space Shuttle? I wrote assembler code for both commercial computers and custom embedded controllers, so there is a great appreciation on my part of the "Art" of assembler programming. With all the C++ libraries and Java libraries, operating systems, it all boils down to the machine code. And going further, Ascii or ebcdic bits and bytes. Ones and zeros account for our daily emails, ipod music, video podcasts, etc. But layers of knowledge have helped us generate great complexity from those simple ones and zeros. But knowledge of the creative kind I would like to believe, although it's all mathematical in nature... very few of us view mathematics as being a creative form... more on that subject later.

I'll close this post which is intended to lead to more posts to delve into these topics by summarizing that interesting things can be observed and derived from analyzing where we started with this whole Computer stuff and how our lives and environment is unfolding with the Computer. Quoting a book title from the great Frank Herbert; "You're nothing without me".