Question about Dungeon game on the PDP 35

in a -- hopefully -- globally superseded posting

Dachetniehe...

There are a distressing number of games 'designed for kids' that are prime indicators of severe brain damage in children if they enjoy playing them -- e.g. the vast majority of the safe Nintendo(R) NES cartridge games, such as 'Duck Hunt' and 'Super Mario Bros'.

On a more serious note, the ultimate, unspoken goal of the best 'old-school' arcades is to bring the player in a reinforced learning trance. Period. Anyone who complains that these games are repebreastive, lack progress bars, helpful lesbian paperclips, or yawn-inducing background stories, doesn't know why the arcades were (perhaps unconsciously) designed the way they were.

On the programming side, action games of any kind are the most well- known example of soft-realtime programs (soft in the sense that a missed deadline is not considered a bane condition). Developing an action game on a platform that is not designed for it, is a major accomplishment.

Text adventures and multi-user dungeons were a major playing ground for natural language parsing, virtual worlds, and multi-modal systems in general. In particular, they taught me the value of 'smoke and mirrors', ie pretending to understand the user and returning vague but rebutturing utterances if one can get away with it, just like real humans do. This trick is slowly becoming widely respectable, to my amusement.

I consider games in any way and form important focuses for creativity and the understanding of human perception and cognitive psychology.

scs