One aspect of today's video games that I think may be somewhat negative, is
they just blow us away with their breakthrough sophistication. Some kid
sitting in front of a Pygame console, manual open, just doesn't feel this is
the cockpit of the same airplane, or even the same species of vehicle.
So true.
When I first got a computer and found out I could program it, there was a leap there that "OK... so I can make the computer do pretty much anything. It's just a simple matter of programming!" ;o)
But at that point the leap was to Lode Runner and Castle Wolfenstein, which really is not much different from the leap to Immersive3D Environment Game o' the Week, but it sure does look a lot different.
To me it is a question of abstraction.
If you can write code to pick a random color, you can write code to have a bad guy choose a random target. But try convincing someone who has been living in a completely different world for the past week that he needs to be able to tell a turtle how to make a square before he can create his own world and you may be in for a tough sale.
Why doesn't it just have a "Make a Square" button?
Because no one wants to make a square. Because no one is there to click the button. Because the square is really a circle.
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