Recently I wrote a piece about The AI That Will Kill Us All [stderr] and hypothesized one thing (which my entire argument hung upon) that looks pretty wrong. I hereby officially declare “I am back to the drawing board.”
*Glaaaarch* (spit); that’s the sound of a goblin hacking up a stringy-looking chunk of gristle and spitting it against the stone wall of the dungeon-room. It echoed.
I’m a pretty avid gamer. And by “avid gamer” I mean that the last time I tried to remember every game I’ve ever played, the list went on for almost 2 pages. Starting with “Space War” on a DEC PDP-1 at the Johns Hopkins University summer fair in 1972, I’m still pretty active, depending on work commitments. Blogging (ahem!) eats into my gaming time, I have noticed.
I’m a fan of the fundamentally flawed category of games known as “space sandbox” – Elite Dangerous and No Man’s Sky are the current two leaders, with Star Citizen in a state of apparent endless alpha test. I hope someone eventually writes a book about the making of Star Citizen, though I fear it will be like “Hearts of Darkness” for gaming.
The names still make us smile: King’s Quest, Gabriel Knight, Laura Bow and The Dagger Of Amon Ra – great games from the days when you had to get the DOS interrupts right if you wanted your Soundblaster card to work right.
I occasionally encounter people on gaming forums who talk about “hardcore gamers” as if there’s some kind of accepted definition of the term. You know: “hardcore gamers are gamers who play more than 25 hours a day and who only drink Red Bull intravenously” or something like that. The problem with such ‘definitions’ is that they rely heavily on vague concepts, which means it’s very easy to play with your interlocutor’s head by recursively asking them for definitions, complaining that their terminology is imprecise. That rhetorical technique is the real reason they killed Socrates.
Sure, there’s some kerfuffle about Ubisoft’s survey, which crashed out if you said you were a female. That’s stupid. But what’s really annoying, to me is…