The new and improved defender of RPGs!

Saturday 15 February 2014

The Tablet and the Annoying Game

On the other hand, continuing from yesterday; it is equally astonishing to me how billions of people now have access to technology that allows us to do the unthinkable: a library of alexandria at our fingertips, and a forum (in the classical sense) where we can engage in learning, teaching and debating with everyone else in the world; and yet most people use this technology to play little games.

I don't have a single game on my tablet; or rather, I didn't, until The Wench forced me to download "Spaceteam".  Spaceteam is an award-winning game and what you can say for it is that it is at least a level of intelligence over the average app-game that  most people obsess over.  Its also frustrating as all fuck.

The premise is that it is a collaborative game, you need two or more people to play; you are pilots on a spaceship, and you need to shout out the orders that appear on your screen. These orders involve manipulating dials and knobs and pushing buttons on the ship's controls; only the controls you have in front of you won't usually be for the commands you receive.  So you have to call out commands for your partner(s) to know what to manipulate while they do the same for you, all in order to keep flying what is obviously the extremely ill-designed spaceship you are on.

Its not my cup of tea. I use my tablet to work, to learn, to study; and for fun I like to read news articles on left- or right- wing online papers and get outraged at what they say.  What I don't want is to be frantically calling out "SET THE DISCOMBOBULATOR TO ONE!!" while shaking my tablet in the air to avoid a meteor strike.

I know for others here it might be just what you want, I'm sure. But seriously, its the one thing that makes me wonder just how much will we really change?  Will our descendants two or three generations down the road, who may have computer nanites in their brains that allows them to exist in a dual-reality of the physical and cyber-space at the same time, look back on us as amusing idiots who didn't understand at all the consequences of what they'd developed; or will they be too busy using their new man-machine reality and instant near-limitless knowledge to play "Angry Birds" v.58.3?

It will probably be a mix of both.  There will be a mass of people who will continue to be slaves to their own limitations, while others will find that the incredible breakthroughs of new technology continue to make ever-more-limitless the potential of their Will.

RPGPundit

Currently Smoking: Castello 4k collection canadian + Image Latakia

No comments:

Post a Comment