Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!sunybcs!sybil.cs.Buffalo.EDU!dill
From: dill@sybil.cs.Buffalo.EDU (Peter Dill)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Game vs Multitasking
Message-ID: <27632@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>
Date: 6 Jun 90 03:04:56 GMT
Sender: news@acsu.Buffalo.EDU
Organization: SUNY@Buffalo Comp Sci and Mindnumbing Tedium
Lines: 75

In article <7958@mirsa.inria.fr> buffa@mirsa.inria.fr writes:
>|> Many of my friends bought their amiga only for playing. They even never 
>|> used the workbench disk. They buy a game, boot and play. When they are
>|> fed up they boot another one on their single drive machine, and they 
>|> don't even know what multitasking mean !!!!!!!!
[same author later on]
>I've got an HD too, but it seems like your friends are pretty rich. People I
>know buy one or two games per months, and that's all their money. They are 15
>years old, and they really don't dream about an HD. In France, the Amiga 500
>are sold in supermarkets. They don't sell HDs, RAM expension boards. They sell
>Amiga 500, games, joysticks, Nintendo, etc...
>

   I'm suprised that you didn't guess the causual relationship. If none
of the kids' software will run with expanded memory or a hd there isn't
much point in them getting them. Besides 2 games a month is $1200 a year,
quite a chunk to a hd to say the least.
   Back when I was in highschool we used to play "B1 Nuclear Bomber" on
PETs and it didn't take long before we figured out that if you changed the
value of a certian varible you got more bombs or how to substitute 
teachers names for Russian cites. Computer games can be insidious like that-
you start off playing games and before you know it you've learned something 
and might even start programming. However the type of games that you
describe that require you to boot off them and reboot when exiting completely
insulate the user from computer and they don't learn anything about the 
computer beyond the boot sequence- not about the os, or the cli or 
windowing interfaces. Consequently they never progress and "learn what 
multi-tasking means" as you say. In contrast here where hog-the-machine
games are less popular I don't know anyone who just boot game disks. Even
if they never had the intention of programming when they bought the computer
, they've learned about fractles, file formats and editors.
   

>I wasn't talking especially about you. (I don't even know you), I was talking
>about the feelings I've got when I read some of the messages here (like,
>yesterday night, I was compiling... and so on.)
>

   My point: if the nature of certain games didn't prevent many users from
using pd games, looking at the source and maybe trying a few things of their
own you wouldn't find the idea of people using compilers so wildly improb-
able. 

   Back to your original advice to developers about not being overly concern-
ed about making nice games. This kind of thinking will cost them customers
and not gain them much. I usually have an editor open and iconified,
and vt1002.6 open and iconified and some files in a recoverable ram disk.
When I play a game I'd like to play it for a while and then exit it and
get back to work. If I have to boot off the disk and worry about losing
my rrd I'm less likely to play it. So if some asks me "what to you think
of Pioneer Plague, Rocket Ranger and Thexder" I'd say there alright games
but I don't use that much because they're too much of a hassle and the
author is likely to lose a sale. Had "Shufflepuck Cafe" been a `nice' game
I would have bought it instead of leaving it at the dealer's. Seeing as
mag reviews mention how well a game fits into the enviroment, an author
who doesn't take some steps to accomodate this will get bad word-of-mouth. 
   Further I'd be suspicious of a program that wasn't nice. How in the
world do you debug a program that bypasses the os? A bunch of #ifdef DEBUGs?
If the author couldn't figure out how to allow the user to use a harddisk
for the program files or how to free all the memory the program allocates
do I really want to risk $40-$50 on the rest of his programming skill? 
   I can understand arcade style games needing a lot of cycles but is it
that much effort to have the "pause game" button reenable multi-tasking?
My guess is that the short amount of time it took to do this would be
recouped in greater sales. 

  So to sum up: non-nice games- they're bad, bad; Dan Quayle- still gaining
       acceptance; boot-requring programs- not gonna buy: naa gaa baa;
       multi-taking? its good! good!; stay the course; a 1000 points of light;
       stay the course.


                                                     Peter Dill 
                                                     dill@cs.buffalo.edu
"Never send a monster to do the work of an evil genius"