So, I thought Id write a little… piece, not sure if it’s and article or a blog really, about a topic that arose last night.
Some background. I am 25. My father is mid 50s. Late last night we were both winding down. I was playing resident evil on the xbox while listening to an audiobook, had my cat on my lap, dad was playing a word game on his phone, listening to a podcast, had our dog on his lap. Cat and dog, hardcore and casual gamers, young and old. Thought this was an amusing dichotomy.
Now, my dad enjoys games in the broad sense of the word. Chess, poker, crosswords, ‘game’ in the sense of ‘a set of challenges’. But other than playing a bit of Myst and DOOM with me as a kid, he’s never been a “gamer”. (Truthfully, neither am I, if you use the term to refer to the subculture of… ugh. Those people. But, I enjoy games as entertainment and truly believe many are works of art (that’s a whole other series of articles though.)
Aaaanyway, to get to the point, he made small talk, asking me a little about what was going on in the plot and so on, and then it struck me how in just my short lifetime games went from rendering 256 pixels was a big fuckin deal and even one polygon was an astounding breakthrough worthy of Star Trek, and now Im playing a game where just my character’s face has something like 100,000 polygons in it. Just the freakin face. For gods’ sake, his eyebrows are individually rendered.
That much progress. In my life time.
And my dad talked about when he was my age he learned to program computers with freakin punchcards.
…it blew my mind how insanely fast technology is zooming along. And this is just, ya know, casual consumer computing. Dont even get me started on massive corporate/government mainframes and super computers.
So in my father’s father’s time, he saw electricity become the norm and computers begin to appear. In my father’s lifetime he saw computers go from massive arcane machines to microchips. In my lifetime i saw interconnectivity go from BBS boards to… well, this perpetual state of interconnectivity that we’re in now.
….makes you wonder why my children will witness, and their children, and so on, doesnt it?
And that would be one of the major reasons I write scifi. Because damn society, you’re amazing.
…and yet, as some things change, some stay the same. Dogs and cats still go on laps, fathers and sons still try to connect, games have been fun for thousands of years. Its just the how that changes. But it sure is fun to wonder just what next evolution lies around the corner, isn’t it?
Wandering Skull 