I felt very Rambo-ish the other night as I fired a rocket-propelled grenade across a narrow ravine toward a hulking Eastern European man. He was armed with a whirling menace of a chain gun that had already sliced two of my comrades into something resembling red confetti. My RPG smashed into the side of the cliff about a foot from his bald head and the resulting detonation dispatched him before the smoke trail had even cleared. I didn't have long to celebrate. An enemy combatant in a red jumpsuit burst from the rickety wooden shack nearby and ignited me with his (or her) flamethrower. It wasn't long before nothing remained but a smoldering lump.
I checked the clock on my book shelf. 12:15am already. Way past this guy's bed time. Despite an urge to re-spawn and get some revenge on the Red Team's pyro, I had big kid stuff (read: work) in a couple hours. Team Fortress 2 and anonymous vengeance would have to wait for another night. I tapped out the usual "good game all" and logged off. ("But Ben, I thought you had screenplays you needed to work on... Why were you playing games for an hour and half?" "Because fuck you, that's why.")
Fast forward about eight hours and I'm in a rectangular division of an office building cubicle struggling with an ancient computer system that I am quite sure was only recently converted from Sumarian BASIC. I'm guessing that this software was programmed in the age of Zork. For those of you who don't remember or were born after Ronald Reagan was president, Zork was a text-based video game. No graphics, just descriptions of where you were. You interacted by typing commands and reading the results of your choices. Kind of like a choose-your-own-adventure novel. That's probably a bad example, since those books were from the same era as Zork.
Oh, the irony. This is not the first time I've run into software that was obsolete ten years ago. This is the era that "real work" and productivity are stuck in. Yet, when I'm bored and need to kill/waste time, I can control a fully articulated character in a 3-dimensional audio/visual world with dynamic lighting that can be affected by tracer fire or muzzle flash from the weapons of any of the other 31 people connected remotely to a server from all corners of the country and even the world, all presented to me at a modest 38 frames-per second at 600 x 800 resolution. And I'm at the trailing edge of this technology. Game stats are updated in real time so I can review my individual performance on the server's website. I wonder if somewhere deep in the coding for this technology, Zork is lurking.
I accidentally hit "enter" on my console at work. I ask around how to go back a step and correct my error. Impossible, I'm told. The only way to correct the error is to tag my last action as invalid, then create a new identical action to replace it and notate which was the correct one to pay attention to. I have just cost myself about ten minutes. Even "Zork" allowed you to step back and see if you missed something... I suddenly feel obsolete.
The band played the SDSU fight song so many times that I've memorized the melody, but for the life of me I couldn't tell you what any of the words are. The lyrics were written on a free binder they gave me as a freshman, but that binder is long gone.
