Comments on: KeepRunning (Final Journal)

By: sol_hsa

sol_hsa — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 09:31:59 +0000

I’ve been pondering on the nature of games, and I distilled the minimal game, from technical point of view, to:

1. Input
2. Time
3. Output

Meaning, all games have some way for the player to interact with it; some way of knowing how the game goes; and some kind of mechanism to move “time” forward. Be it passing turn to the next player, or “real-time” as in FPSes, RTSes, etc.

Thus, I think the real minimal game would be something in lines of:

ENTER NUMBER: 20
MY NUMBER IS 1000020, YOU LOST!

It also means that everything is a game - you “play” with a candy dispenser machine by entering coins and pressing a button, and you get candy as output. Time is also present here, as the “turn” to act changes from the player to the machine, and back.

Anyway, with the effort you took for writing all that, I would have expected you could have written an actual game, too.. =)

By: AK47

AK47 — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:16:36 +0000

@negativegeforce: Be careful what you say there; you wouldn’t want to offend one of those haughty “games are art” types!

Also, I think poker is a game made entirely out of still images, no?

By: AK47

AK47 — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:06:42 +0000

@SteelGolem: Oh, totally. (But as an artist, I don’t think I am supposed to admit it. Whoops.)

Why must the game be confined to the executable. I could design a computer game that has no executable at all: See how many processes you can run concurrently without crashing either the operating system or any of the processes. Whoever has the most processes running wins. Kids play (and design) games like this all the time. Isn’t my game equivalent to a staring contest? Whoever can keep their eyes open longer wins? These types of games can be played in solitaire too. See how many times you can bounce a basketball with one hand in an hour, then try to beat that record.

A game does not necessarily have to give you feedback. Take the basketball bouncing game. The only tally is in your head. The wall clock is not part of the game, but merely one of many possible ways to keep track of the time.

@Hamumu: You don’t even need the Task Manager to play! You could use a stopwatch, or a wall clock to tell how long you had been running the game. The Task Manager just seemed to be the most accurate to me.

By: paul

paul — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 04:39:01 +0000

you, good sir, win at the internets.

By: negativegeforce

negativegeforce — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 16:06:43 +0000

I figured someone would make these empty programs. Its doubtful any normal person would view this as any game. A game as input, process and output. It seems your trying to make a game out of a still image which doesn’t qualify it as a game more like a piece of artwork. We are, unfortunately not making artwork in the competition.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:32:08 +0000

Your post represents everything I despised in my liberal arts classes.

By: Hamumu

Hamumu — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:00:03 +0000

Just thought of something more to further the argument - a painting is invisible until you shine light on it. Whether that’s sunlight or a spotlight or whatever, paintings can’t be viewed without light. Similarly, this game can’t be played with task manager. Seems equivalent to me!

I think if you sit and play this game a while, you get the artist’s message - an exploration of just how much your time is worth. Do you really want to sit there doing nothing at your computer? Should you go read a book while it runs? Why not just kill it and be done? Why not indeed.

By: Hamumu

Hamumu — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:51:36 +0000

But a ‘game’ isn’t just a computer game. I liked the discussion of boxing above, and it brings this home: an implicit rule in any computer game is “you can only interact with it using the hardware of your computer” - you would not win Space Invaders by blowing your computer up, even though that would destroy the virtual aliens. Therefore, using task manager to show how far you have gotten makes just as much sense as using the mouse to click on things - the environment of the game is a Windows PC, and therefore, the task manager is there. Nobody has a functional Windows PC that lacks a task manager!

By: SteelGolem

SteelGolem — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:30:09 +0000

generally a game would give you enough information on its own to tell you if you’re winning or losing, or indicate in some way with its own output whether you’re approaching a goal or not. this entry isn’t doing that, its relying on a second process that wasn’t created for the sole intent of being used by this program for this intent. also, if you HAD wrapped a second program to mimic what you’re trying to do with taskman/taskmgr, that would automatically drive the complexity of the program up. yet another problem is that there’s no win or lose state! i think you just wanted to have a philosophical discussion

By: Rudy_Guillan

Rudy_Guillan — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 10:23:19 +0000

In Assembler I think it’s more simple:

JMP -1

At least in a theoric CPU, I don’t know if in a real CPU the instruction has changed.

… This is a game???

By: philhassey

philhassey — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 06:25:57 +0000

In python the same game can be written in 12 bytes of code: “while 1:pass”
However, to distribute this as a py2exe binary would still weigh in at 2MB or so.

Excellent artists statement.