A revolution, indeed.

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This is just an assignment in my English class. The big topic is popular culture and this is what i have came out. i wanted to put it here because i thought that we all are a part of it, the revolution that i am speaking of. If you feel like it, suggest a title, anything to add or correct any errors.


An inevitable revolution has started; you can either avoid it or join it. No matter what choice you made, you are left no choice when it comes to recognizing it. Intimidating it may be now, but this revolution has its humble origin. It started as two paddles and a ball in 1972, a simple program that with adequate lessons any high school students can come out with. In 1987, we started to build Russian bricks. When personal computers started to sell in market, a Persian prince equipped with a scimitar and 3 vital points also began his quest of rescuing his distressed princess in 1989. It is also during the same time that we built a city called Simsville. It only gets better from here when personal computers became a standard household appliance. In 1991, we fought the Kilrathi in space. In 1992, we helped a trapped soldier to escape Castle Wolfenstein. In 1993, we violently fought off the aliens that doom us all. All these omens pointed to one thing, popularization of PC games is going to change the way we live.

We all know that if there were no computers, there will be no computer games. It is computers that started computer games in the old days but the tide has turned now. A motivation behind upgrading computer games for many people nowadays is to be able to play tomorrow games with sophisticated graphics and vivid sound effects. Computer is not just a machine to do word processing and math calculations. There is a reason behind advancement of video cards like Voodoo, TNT, GeForce and even RADEON. There used to be two fans in a typical computer, one is for the processor and the other one is for voltage source. When GeForce came with a fan attached, it was made known that the quest for better graphics has reached a new era. Word processing and math calculation do not require such intense graphical calculation that involves potential overheating. It was the fancy images in Quake 3 that we are perusing that put GeForce on shelves. Do we really need a 40-Gig hard disk to store our few hundreds Ks documents? It was the stories set around the huge area of Sword Coast that made us look for hard disk with such storage capacity. Do we really need an Athlon XP 3200 to shoot a spacecraft to moon? It was the high pace action, overwhelming sound effects and flashy colors in Unreal Tournament that pushed the developers’ ability once again to make faster processors into reality. As consumers are more demanding on their gaming experience, hardware companies now are developing products with higher quality to satisfy this desire. It is the greed for better computer to run better games that pushes the wheel of computer hardware industry.

To play computer games, one has to know about computers. This new ability of tuning computers will be later use by anthropologists and historians to define late 20th century people. I started playing computer games without able to differentiate between 386 and 486-DX2. As I dived into the world of computer games, I started to acquire and accumulate skills and knowledge of tuning a personal computer. The bottomless appetite of playing better games lifted my awareness of hardware development. While playing games under Windows, I was conditioned with the ability to manage cache, registry, virtual memory, and even to endure the infamous Blue Screen of Death. All these are just a start. For those who have some computer languages background, computer games offer you a stage to show off and enrich your skills. Remember, Tetris started from the Moscow Academy of Sciences. One of the most successful computer games, Counter-Strike, started as a modification based on the codes of the original game, Half-Life. The involvement in a computer game is not just playing the game; it also contains computer knowledge and computing ability.

When we were introduced to internet, we all know that this is going to change our life forever. When putting internet to computer games, a revolution to another, the impact is enormous. Typical arcade or console games would give you a maximum of 6 players in a multiplayer game. Playing Everquest, you are adventuring with other thousands of players in the world of Norrath. Massive multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) like this gave birth to a new way of social life. “It’s not just Hack-and-Slash” featured in PC Gamer July 2003, gave a glimpse on how new business and relationship in reality has established based on the virtual worlds. Interactions in such world started without physical perception. The person at the other end may be handicapped by real world but through such games, this person can interact freely without much discrimination against. An interesting sample is to search for “Diablo 2” under ebay.com. Some 5000 returns will be shown. Most of these are auctions of items found in the game. There are actually people who are willing to trade money in reality for items in virtual reality. Along with internet comes also WCG (World Cyber Games) tournament, a worldwide competition of computer games skills held annually since 2000. In my country, Malaysia, this tournament was even supported by the Ministry of Youth and Sports Development. Multiplayer computer games made possible competition and friendship established across physical boundaries.

Two paddles and a ball is its start. In a short 30 years, it has become a worldwide competition. PC gaming are not just any leisure activity, it is a revolution taken place within our time, right in front of us. For better or worse, we cannot deny that this revolution taken is part of our culture, a part of a bigger picture that labeled us as Generation X. Are you in, are you out?

[ June 24, 2003, 00:10: Message edited by: teekc ]

 

I recommend you change "sticks" to "paddles".

I thought you meant baseball or something for awhile.

 

And I recommend hitting the "return" key once in a while. Yikes! Hurts your brain, man.

 

Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas

The memories of olden times fade slowly...

 

i typed this in ms words, double spacing, fonts 12 and such, i just copy the whole thing here. Din't expect the negative effects.

Paddles, that's the word i was long for.

But anyway, earlier this morning, my lecturer told me that the essay was restricted to 300 words. Oh well.

My high school English essay was 240 wrods and English was suppose to be our thrid language. i traveled half the globe end up in America and the word limit for college essay is 300?

 

Heh, sounds like you were lucky enough to miss the days in which you had to load your games from an audio tape.

The first machine I played games on was an SC3000H (made by Sega... not a games console, an actual fully-blown computer). I'd be guessing that was about 1985... maybe 1986, but I think they date back to 1983. Fun stuff. Then on to 086, 286, 486, pentium, etc (I never owned a 386).

Don't forget Elite!

 

For me 086, 286, 486SX, Pentium (plain, MMX, II and Celerons) home and worked on 386SX (IIRC), 486DX2 and 4. Probably never seen a 386DX, never seen a Pentium Pro.

My first PC XT had 640KB RAM that's enough for everyone, 5.25'' floppy drive, Hercules graphics card and no hard disk. Then it got upgraded... to 286 16MHZ with 1MB RAM and CGA/Hercules graphics that had to be switched all the time... and yes, finally a 3.5'' drive and a huge 40MB hard disk. More or less at the same time my mother's husband brought some 486SX from work (he's a programmer). What a rocket it was! Whole 80 meg disk space, SVGA graphics, oh joy! Later on, I got a Cirrus VGA card with 256KB RAM for my 286. Some time after this, he bought himself a Pentium 100 and I annexed the 486... Again some time later a Pentium 60 found itself on my desk (with a CD drive and a SoundBlaster!), the only true mancament being monochromatic VGA monitor (max 640*480, 8 bit colour) while even another 286 in the house (22 mhz) had an SVGA one. I soon got that SVGA one anyway. For a short time this PC bore a Pentium 166 MMX processor and then I didn't have any computer at all. Finally I got my Pentium II 350 machine with an 8 meg graphics card, 6 gig disk space, proper CD drive and colour monitor. It's the same computer I'm now using, only no part of it has served the whole period. The present Old Man consists of Celeron 800, 384 meg of RAM (slow 133 MHZ, 100 used), Riva TNT2 M64 (sucks!) 32 MB, some DVD16 that has seen up to 5 DVD disks, 60 gig hard disk and a monitor with curved display (1 cm difference left/right top/bottom).