Gook

Once upon a time I had a difference of agreement with Suw about whether or not I was a geek. She argued I was, while I disputed that assertion. Today, belatedly, I concede the point.

The reason for my admission of geekiness is down to two things. Firstly, I spent much of my weekend computer programming. This isn’t so bad as it would have been when my work involved lots of programming, but nowadays I’m mainly writing specifications, documentation or sticking pencils up my nose and going wibble. The reason I was programming was because I’ve had a hankering to write a computer game for some time and I woke up on Saturday morning intent on doing it.

Now there a number of obstacles in the way of me producing a computer game. There are the technical hurdles. My knowledge of programming is limited to building small cogs in the expansive machinery of corporate systems, not games. Hence several hours on Saturday afternoon dumbly trying to figure out the connect string Visual C# would use to access my SQL Server database. However, figuring out the syntax and limitations of a new language is nothing compared to my biggest problem:

Ambition.

Y’see, what I spent the weekend doing was not writing a game, I was building a game engine. This engine currently takes a list of people and assigns each of them to one of five locations each round. At the end of each round, each person randomly decides whether they liked or disliked that location. Their liking is then fed into their choice of where to go next round. As you tot up the rounds, the people start developing preferences for certain locations over others. From simple rules arise more complex emergent behaviour.

I got all that working quite nicely, eventually, but that’s only the beginning. I forced myself to stop on Sunday afternoon whilst debugging stage 2; wherein that random like or dislike of a location is governed instead by the person’s interaction with the other people in the location that round. Stage 3 will introduce memes, which can be transmitted and mutate with each interaction. Stage 4 might give each person a concept of what the other people are ‘thinking’. Around stage 58, I might start looking at putting a game in there somewhere. In the meantime, I have a few design problems with stage 2 to resolve first.

Alternatively, I might decide that my time would be better spent writing stories. At least when writing stories I find time to snack while waiting for the inspiration to type out that next sentence. When programming, when trying to solve a problem of logic rather than judgement, I tend to get a bit absorbed. When I get absorbed in something like that I tend to defer eating. And sleeping. That’s geek behaviour.

The other damning geekiness of the weekend I found on Youtube late last night. Some of you may be aware of the genius of Yu-Gi-Oh, but whether you are or not, you should catch up with the epic tale by watching Yu-Gi-Oh (The Abridged Series), where the half-hour episodes are condensed into four or five minutes. Installments are already disappearing as Youtube take them down for alleged copyright infringement, but if you search around you should be able to catch them all (wait, that’s Pokemon, isn’t it?).