[HN Gopher] A video game where you are an operating system
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       A video game where you are an operating system
        
       Author : drfreckles
       Score  : 593 points
       Date   : 2023-08-13 23:21 UTC (23 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (plbrault.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (plbrault.com)
        
       | dextersgenius wrote:
       | You know what would be cool? A defragmentation game. It's
       | basically Tetris but in a circular layout, and you get more
       | points the better optimized it is - with frequently used data
       | blocks towards the outer tracks and old/archive file types
       | towards the inner tracks.
       | 
       | I always enjoyed watching graphical defragmenters do their magic
       | back in the day and would unironically love to play a defragging
       | game.
        
         | reaperducer wrote:
         | Sort of the opposite of Breakout.
        
           | samplatt wrote:
           | Or the opposite of a particular type of block-tapping mobile
           | game, like these on Android/iOS:
           | 
           | https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=clear.tap.geom.
           | .. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tap-away-3d/id1568058543
        
         | RheingoldRiver wrote:
         | it's not really related in concept, but I feel like playing
         | various puzzles with pentominoes would feel a bit similar to
         | this, as it's spatial reasoning puzzles. I _adore_ pentominoes
         | and spent a large portion of my childhood playing with them,
         | recently rediscovered them as an adult.
        
           | joveian wrote:
           | For me it was Tangrams, which I've only seen one somewhat odd
           | (in a "feels outsourced" kind of way) computer game (not that
           | you can really improve on the physical version). I first
           | thought you said pantomimes, which could also be interesting
           | :).
        
             | RheingoldRiver wrote:
             | Definitely played with tangrams too, and funnily enough, I
             | had a bunch of animal-shaped puzzles that I guess you could
             | call pantomimes haha. If you enjoyed tangrams enough, I
             | can't recommend enough picking up a set of pentominoes -
             | definitely agree that a physical set is the right call.
             | There's 12 total so you have 60 individual squares,
             | (pentominoes are 5-square tiles), so popular figures are
             | 6x10, 5x12 (a bit harder than 6x10), and 3x20 (very
             | challenging). You can also get cubes and do 2x5x6 (really
             | hard) or 3x4x5 (even harder).
             | 
             | Recently though, I've been doing 8x8 - 4, which means
             | picking 4 squares to remove from an 8x8 square and then
             | filling in the rest (I have some wooden boards i picked up
             | from an etsy seller but you can just as easily trace the
             | outline on paper and color in the forbidden cells, which
             | I've also done). Which has been delightful!
        
               | joveian wrote:
               | Thanks for the recommendation, I'll give them a try :).
        
         | Sparkyte wrote:
         | Lets up the stakes and use a real drive as part of the
         | sacrifice to the game.
        
           | seanthemon wrote:
           | Let's up the stakes and use a real production storage in the
           | game
        
             | jwestbury wrote:
             | An even more specific version of DOOM for sysadmins, then?
        
               | KevinDonnot wrote:
               | psDooM is what you need: a FPS to frag system processes
               | 
               | https://psdoom.sourceforge.net/
        
         | snvzz wrote:
         | It is still fun to run the real thing[0].
         | 
         | 0. https://www.nongnu.org/free-defrag/
        
         | MatthewCampbell wrote:
         | https://defrag.lolalabs.com/
        
           | bibanez wrote:
           | Cool proof of concept... not a fun game
        
           | will5421 wrote:
           | I can't scroll down to see the rest of the lines
        
           | registeredcorn wrote:
           | I like the idea, but I noticed that there seems to be some
           | kind of issue with it registering clicks. I don't know if I'm
           | just sometimes clicking _slightly_ outside of the hitboxes or
           | what, but I find myself  "dragging" stuff by accident when
           | the game doesn't register that I "dropped" whatever object I
           | had selected.
        
         | etrautmann wrote:
         | I felt that way about PCB routing and layout when I was
         | building electronics.
        
           | fragmede wrote:
           | You're talking about Shenzen.io by Zachtronics, aren't you
           | 
           | https://www.zachtronics.com/shenzhen-io/
        
             | stavros wrote:
             | I just bought this off your recommendation and I hate you
             | now.
        
               | registeredcorn wrote:
               | There's also a minigame in Electrician Simulator that has
               | you repair various broken objects by replacing
               | components. It's strangely satisfying.
               | 
               | https://www.gog.com/en/game/electrician_simulator
        
           | ghodith wrote:
           | Might make a good career then.
        
             | etrautmann wrote:
             | somehow I ended up in Neuroscience, where I get to use the
             | electronics skills occasionally, but even that is mostly
             | focused on ASIC design now.
        
             | krasin wrote:
             | > Might make a good career then.
             | 
             | Is it, though? As much as the autorouters "known" to not
             | work, I expect that a working one is less than 10 years
             | away. Even for PCIe-level complexity.
        
               | jakear wrote:
               | The "career" in question could be autorouter developing.
               | 
               | That said, I'd suspect it's similar to CS:
               | _autoprogrammers_ are  "known" to not work. If you can
               | understand and articulate the business logic in a concise
               | way, understand and articulate all the components of the
               | system and how they may interfere with each other,
               | understand and articulate the system's nominal and
               | practical input ranges, etc., then sure something might
               | _autoprogram_ the code for you, but it 's not the
               | autoprogrammer doing the real work.
        
               | RF_Savage wrote:
               | But will the autorouted pcb pass EMC?
        
               | junon wrote:
               | Highly doubt that, and routing is only part of the
               | puzzle.
        
         | 2Gkashmiri wrote:
         | windows 98 SE had the coolest disk defragmentation animation.
         | it felt wrong when it just never reappeared.
        
           | iforgotpassword wrote:
           | It looked exactly the same as 98 and 95, there was nothing
           | changed.
        
             | 2Gkashmiri wrote:
             | i mean, onwards from XP
        
         | runnerup wrote:
         | https://classic.csunplugged.org/activities/community-activit...
         | (see also: https://www.itgsnews.com/the-defragmentation-game-
         | lesson-pla... )
         | 
         | https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/376284/defrag
         | 
         | https://www.defraggame.com
         | 
         | There used to be a few old ones in the day that I recall trying
         | which were a bit more direct simulacrums than these. Not sure
         | if anyone else might find them!
        
         | mos_basik wrote:
         | Wilmot's Warehouse is basically this.
         | 
         | It's top-down 2D. You are alone in a large, empty warehouse. At
         | regular intervals, a truck drops off a load of assorted objects
         | at the back, and a few people ask you for some specific objects
         | at the counter in front. Your role is to arrange the objects in
         | the warehouse such that you can fill the requests in the least
         | amount of time, and you can do this in any way that works for
         | you (by color, function, name, etc).
         | 
         | As the game goes on, the truck drops off more and more
         | different kinds of objects (usually ones that fit into more
         | than one category), and the requests get more and more
         | complicated.
         | 
         | At the end you get a time-lapse of the whole warehouse over the
         | whole game and you can see your strategy evolving over time.
         | 
         | Pretty well executed and simple. Heard about it from one of its
         | devs in a HN comment actually.
        
       | itronitron wrote:
       | Fun, I wonder if anyone has done a garbage collection game. I'm
       | imagining an isometric view, like Zaxxon, where you drive a
       | garbage truck around and collect dead references.
        
         | PurpleRamen wrote:
         | Or maybe just fit it into Doom, equip a flamethrower, and burn
         | the corpse of dead processes and their zombies. Not that we
         | hadn't this already before in some way.
        
       | thisOtterBeGood wrote:
       | Found a small bug i think. If i assign a process to the cpu just
       | when it dies (during the fly anmiation i guess) the game freezes
       | (Cannot click any buttons anymore).
       | https://i.imgur.com/4gbwwEZ.png
        
       | keyle wrote:
       | Games like these have a strong future.
       | 
       | Basically games that innovate beyond what a game engines like
       | Unity or Unreal can offer are, by design, going in a direction
       | that is more likely to succeed than anything we see come out
       | these days...
       | 
       | Making super nerdy games that are so far off the field the
       | engines users can't touch you, puts you in a different league;
       | even if your game looks like a dog's breakfast, as long as it's
       | fun and usable.
       | 
       | Indie games are dead, in the sense that they were indie games 5
       | years ago. This, is the new indie games now. GG. (ref: failed
       | indie developer with 2+ commercial titles).
       | 
       | It's a shame that Zachtronics stopped, they've always been ahead
       | of the game.
        
         | duxup wrote:
         | Maybe I'm missing something in your post but I find the same
         | types of games have been popular for many decades now. I'm not
         | sure those are any less likely to succeed, or that "You're the
         | OS!" is more likely to succeed.
         | 
         | And I'm pretty sure you can make this game in Unity...
        
           | cornel_io wrote:
           | Not only could you make this in Unity, it'd probably be
           | easier than in Pygame by a good margin.
           | 
           | Game tech is basically universal for zero-graphics games like
           | this, it's 100% "business logic". If you have to fight with
           | the UI/display system for even a moment to make a game like
           | this, then you're probably either using a library without
           | enough features (which, ahem...Pygame, yeah...) or you just
           | don't know the system well enough to be efficient.
        
           | zogrodea wrote:
           | I remember, as a child, having fun with a Yoshi (from Mario)
           | fangame that pretended like he was in Windows 95/98. It might
           | have been this one. https://youtu.be/AwZfivyZ20c?t=184
        
           | pests wrote:
           | I'm guessing they are used to the default Unity 3D scene and
           | player controller.
           | 
           | Unity can create any type of game. In the end it's just
           | helping you push vertices and shaders around.
           | 
           | I do agree Unreal has it's roots more in 3D character
           | shooters. A lot of assumptions built in but you can still
           | work around them there too.
        
         | dragonwriter wrote:
         | > Basically games that innovate beyond what a game engines like
         | Unity or Unreal can offer are, by design, going in a direction
         | that is more likely to succeed than anything we see come out
         | these days
         | 
         | It depends what you mean by "succeed". If you mean, "turn a
         | profit", probably not. Games that are far off the trend
         | supported by engines optimized for what the market is looking
         | for probably will fail _more often_ than games within it.
         | 
         | If you mean, "become a surprise, breakout, hit that changes the
         | direction of gaming", yes, the extremely low probability of
         | that happening in either case is probably higher for games that
         | are outside of the box.
         | 
         | Better chance of a home run, but also better chance of getting
         | out, and less chance of getting a hit.
        
         | PurpleRamen wrote:
         | Not sure what you are talking about. Nerdy Games have existed
         | all the time, and they usually not very successful because they
         | are so nerdy. In the last years, we also had a number of tech-
         | nerdy games, but none of them could be called a hit. They
         | probably make their game, but as the audience is naturally
         | small, their ceiling for success is limited. And I don't see
         | this changing in the future. It's probably the opposite, as the
         | younger generation seems to become less nerdy, and more
         | distanced from low-level topics and tech.
        
         | mcluck wrote:
         | There's no reason this couldn't have been built in Unity or
         | Unreal. You can build literally anything (within the limits of
         | computation) in those engines.
        
         | dangero wrote:
         | In what way does this game go beyond what Unity can offer?
        
       | infogulch wrote:
       | As the game gets harder with higher utilization you should be
       | able to "buy" upgrades with tokens that you "earn" for hitting
       | milestones or performance targets that automate small mundane
       | tasks. Kinda like the universal paperclips game. Then you throw
       | pathological workloads at the user that thwart the simple
       | automations so you have to unstick it manually. So the user buys
       | upgrades to slightly better automations, thwarted again by
       | slightly more pathological workloads... Boom game progression
       | loop.
        
         | MagicMoonlight wrote:
         | Yeah I want to be able to buy a memory allocator. And maybe
         | even the option to write one
        
       | fragmede wrote:
       | FWIW, this was posted to HN on Sept 30th* and gained zero
       | traction, with even the poster deleting their own comment.
       | 
       | As I posted there, it's a really good concept. Add in levels (eg
       | microcontroller in $interesting_product, is on a smartphone, load
       | balancer or api box for a SaaS company), with the levels letting
       | you introduce concepts one at a time, and then you've got
       | yourself a college grade operating systems class. Throw in a bit
       | of programming for automation and dig deep into OS cache
       | algorithms (LRU baby!) and that's something I could have finished
       | before I graduated high school.
       | 
       | * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36938032
        
       | mamborambo wrote:
       | In fact human living is basically a type of operating system, as
       | we all juggle on a daily basis tasks, resources, input/output,
       | storage, cache, and states. The concept of dashboard is an
       | essential operating system tool, and on a human scale it is
       | basically your bank, tasks, calendar and inboxes. Plenty of "self
       | improvement" concepts then translate neatly into operating system
       | best practices, such as using FIFO or LIFO to manage allocations,
       | planning ahead to break deadlock situations, managing
       | parallelism, and JIT garbage collection etc.
        
         | codetrotter wrote:
         | Humans often like to compare the brain to technology.
         | 
         | For example, when gears were high tech there were people that
         | drew heads with gears turning inside of the head, likening the
         | act of thinking to the motion of gears. And I think in cartoons
         | etc we still see this sometimes.
         | 
         | :D
        
           | codetrotter wrote:
           | Also relevant: "How an Algorithm Feels from Inside" (2008)
           | 
           | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-
           | alg...
        
           | duckmysick wrote:
           | Yes, I remember those. And later, a light bulb flashing
           | inside of the head when the character has an idea.
        
             | TeMPOraL wrote:
             | Gears did something, they stood for purposeful activity. A
             | light bulb illuminates its surrounding, letting you see in
             | the dark - an apt metaphor for having an idea, seeing
             | something that previously couldn't be seen, etc. In both
             | cases these are metaphors, not actually imagining the brain
             | running on gears or light bulbs.
             | 
             | Computer analogies are different. These are direct, not
             | metaphorical, and rightfully so, because computation is
             | fundamental and not just a piece of technology. Computer
             | science stands at the intersection between mathematics and
             | physics.
        
         | isolli wrote:
         | It reminds me a bit of this book, which I recommend: Algorithms
         | to live by.
         | 
         | [0] https://algorithmstoliveby.com/
        
         | rolisz wrote:
         | And civilization is a distributed operating system! (I heard
         | this from Joscha Bach)
        
         | white_dragon88 wrote:
         | What is the operating system analogy for whacking off? Clearing
         | the cache?
        
           | sva_ wrote:
           | Luckily our computer hardware can Not self-repruduce yet.
        
             | codetrotter wrote:
             | But computer software can. Worms, viruses, etc
             | 
             | Heck, even the operating system could reproduce in some
             | sense. If the operating system on one machine is set up to
             | regard itself as DHCP server, it would begin responding to
             | DHCP requests in the local network. And in the DHCP
             | response it can provide network boot instructions telling
             | other computers to network boot a copy of the OS image of
             | itself that it is serving. Any other computer that is
             | configured to net boot could then boot the OS. Of course
             | most computers are not set up to net boot out of the box.
             | But on a network where they use net boot already you might
             | be able to race their own DHCP server and get some of the
             | clients to boot your OS image instead.
        
           | engcoach wrote:
           | Sending an email to yourself
        
           | sorokod wrote:
           | Garbage Collection
        
             | hbn wrote:
             | I'd say sleep is more analogous to GC.
        
         | sorokod wrote:
         | Possibly our autonomic nervous system is closer to what we
         | think is an OS. Abstracts over the low level operation of the
         | wetware
         | 
         | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_nervous_system
        
       | shove wrote:
       | Very cool. Reminds me of the game posted last week (defcon
       | thing?) in which Tetris-block-like squares containing op codes
       | fall and the user has to position Rube Goldberg sequences that
       | shuffle the biggest possible number into the "score" memory
       | register
        
         | smokel wrote:
         | For those interested, that was OFRAK Tetris:
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37083309
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | markus_zhang wrote:
       | And very soon you will provide a scripting language that allow
       | the OS to automate things, right?
       | 
       | Oh I see...
        
         | iforgotpassword wrote:
         | Let's use a C interpreter so we can just copy Linux code
         | over... Or the other way round.
        
       | Konohamaru wrote:
       | Superlatively cool.
        
       | xunil2ycom wrote:
       | so much stress. It's too much like my dev machine.
        
       | Apocryphon wrote:
       | This is pretty nerdy but c'mon, it's like Cookie Clicker or some
       | other idle game when compared to Zachtronics titles.
        
         | nextaccountic wrote:
         | > Zachtronics
         | 
         | Kinda sad that the dev quitted
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | TillE wrote:
         | It fits very comfortably into the category of "time management"
         | game, which was a fairly popular casual genre 10-15 years ago.
         | Cook Serve Delicious is probably the one notable example which
         | is still going strong.
         | 
         | Definitely distinct from idle games.
        
           | joveian wrote:
           | Wilmot's Warehouse is the one it most reminds me of (maybe
           | the graphics), which is quite fun (except for the random
           | crashing :( that seems to get worse after it starts
           | happening). This one needs a lot of work, though. I did it
           | wrong it seems looking at the other comments here but nothing
           | about this one makes me want to try again. Wilmot's Warehouse
           | has excellent pacing. The theme of this one could be made to
           | work well but throwing everything at the player right away
           | and see how long they can keep going is not my idea of fun.
           | I'd suggest automation options combined with changing the use
           | pattern of the system over time. Plus something to give the
           | player more customization options so it isn't just "do this
           | repetitive task as quickly as you can". Maybe a choice of
           | cute loading icons that you can display in certain
           | circumstances?
           | 
           | Mini Metro is another well known game in the time management
           | genera. I've seen some recent games with this design and
           | played a demo of a not yet released game. It seems like a
           | common small indie game genera since larger developers don't
           | seem to touch it that I can think of (except possibly some
           | mini games? I can't think of anything off hand but there must
           | be some). I guess the larger developers go for RTS games
           | instead.
           | 
           | Possibly the OS theme could be turned into a kind of "bot
           | combat" game (at least I think that would be the general
           | genera I'm thinking of, but without direct combat in this
           | case) if the internals are automated and then compared to the
           | market as a whole, with established OSes that are fairly good
           | at everything but not great at anything. These established
           | OSes could then take various anti-competitive actions along
           | the way that force you to get better at a different specialty
           | than you previously targeted.
        
         | Scaevolus wrote:
         | TIS-100 is certainly far up there in "nerdiest game" rankings,
         | and I must offer Bombe as well, the only game I know of that
         | embeds Z3: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2262930/Bombe/
        
           | anta40 wrote:
           | I think Core War (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War) is
           | even nerdier, too bad there's no updated, polished
           | implementation.
           | 
           | P.S: I'm also a big fan of Zachtronics games: TIS-100,
           | Shenzen I/O etc etc
        
         | xeckr wrote:
         | Unlike cookie clicker, this game can actually teach you
         | something.
        
           | Apocryphon wrote:
           | I'm not contesting that, just making an analogy to quibble
           | against "the nerdiest game ever" claim. Like I appreciate its
           | existence but just saying there are entire genres of this
           | stuff.
        
           | cwillu wrote:
           | I learned a great deal about the dangers of grandmas from
           | cookieclicker.
        
       | bratgpttamer wrote:
       | TIL: Being a computer is _hard_ and I don 't ever want to be a
       | computer.
        
         | aio2 wrote:
         | Well it's a good thing it's an autonomous job already replaced
         | by computers.
        
       | iraqmtpizza wrote:
       | dwarf fortress rekt
        
       | smountjoy wrote:
       | I like to imagine that, as in Ender's Game, the top-ranked player
       | is unknowingly allocating memory for some critical infrastructure
       | somewhere.
        
         | shostack wrote:
         | Getting Severance vibes.
        
           | flopsamjetsam wrote:
           | Just started watching this, and I have no real idea what's
           | going on :)
        
           | doctorwho42 wrote:
           | Oh man,(spoilers) my pet theory is that the 'work' is
           | actually them self-adjusting their implants. Remember they
           | describe a number as a 'feeling' and some numbers 'feel'
           | wrong. And we see behind the scenes that they are testing the
           | main character with the psychiatrist/wife to see if it breaks
           | the 'chips control/severance'.
           | 
           | They are simply engineers perfecting the implants so that
           | they operate better.
        
             | aspenmayer wrote:
             | I think that the numbers are in-house red team fuzzing
             | attempts against the implant, with the goal being lower
             | mean time between failures of the implant. It could also
             | represent a debugger IDE, with the "spooky" numbers that we
             | see jumping around onscreen on the workstation representing
             | some kind of bad data that doesn't pass tests that the
             | normal numbers onscreen do pass.
             | 
             | I'm reminded of the in house help desk tech support that
             | someone calls for in the film Vanilla Sky, analogously.
        
         | SilasX wrote:
         | "To compete your registration, tell us whether this image has a
         | stop sign. And hurry it up, our self driving car needs this."
         | 
         | https://xkcd.com/1897/
        
       | aviavinash wrote:
       | Aren't we are the operating system and the main character in all
       | the game?
        
       | MaxikCZ wrote:
       | I selected easy and still got fed so many processes I cant
       | possibly satisfy them all for more than a minute. What am I doing
       | wrong?
        
         | NooneAtAll3 wrote:
         | Same. If easy is that stressful, what happens on higher levels?
         | 
         | I think easy makes you forget about memory-swap side of the
         | game. Still feels unfairly hard tho
        
         | explaininjs wrote:
         | Remove any processes with an hourglass from the queue, and
         | frequently click the I/O Events button to clear out the
         | hourglasses.
        
           | MaxikCZ wrote:
           | I think I was already doing that, yet by the time 4 processes
           | in processor turn green, 10 processes in queue turns red?
           | Also even in the first 10 seconds I was already clicking like
           | mad, wasnt really "easy" mode.
           | 
           | Maybe one of my extensions designed to skip "wait 10 sec to
           | skip this" is messing up the timings of the game?
        
             | SilasX wrote:
             | I saw the same with no extensions. My only hope was to do
             | custom mode and give myself more cpus and lower I/O
             | probability.
             | 
             | Edit: Also, keyboard shortcuts would be really, really
             | nice.
             | 
             | Edit2: Also, the "menu" button in the top right isn't
             | clickable (unless I resize) because the "Follow drfreckles"
             | and "add to collection" buttons overlay it.
        
             | explaininjs wrote:
             | Could be the extension. Though the logic seems to be all in
             | wasm, not sure how the extension would modify it.
        
             | pcthrowaway wrote:
             | > Maybe one of my extensions designed to skip "wait 10 sec
             | to skip this" is messing up the timings of the game?
             | 
             | Might be related to time accounting differences between
             | browsers also... are you using firefox?
        
               | MaxikCZ wrote:
               | Edge (sorry)
        
               | explaininjs wrote:
               | Fine for me on edge. Maybe don't wait for processes to go
               | totally green? If something is dark red/frozen it needs
               | to be on the CPU immediately, regardless of what else is
               | there.
        
       | samsquire wrote:
       | I've been trying to imagine a game which is like a real time
       | strategy game for programming
       | 
       | You command coroutines, threads and processes across machines to
       | do work for you, like units.
       | 
       | You can collect data from database, transform it in a pipeline
       | and give it back.
        
       | pil0u wrote:
       | Reminds me of this game where you are a paper clip factory:
       | https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
        
         | mdaniel wrote:
         | recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36972227 (not
         | only discussed, but also plenty of "if you liked, you'll also
         | enjoy" recommendations in there to further dissolve time into a
         | blur)
        
       | spiritplumber wrote:
       | Give it a Tron skin and I'll play it for a whole day <3
        
       | benj111 wrote:
       | Coming soon, an OS where all components are gamified and done by
       | humans.
        
       | bijoo wrote:
       | uptime 0:07:44 - 259513
        
       | dxdm wrote:
       | Awesome idea, but it's too hard for me. In normal mode, I'm
       | already clicking like a maniac in the first 20 seconds of the
       | game, and red processes accumulate, even though I'm cycling out
       | the blocked ones. I had one process killed because no IO event
       | ever came for it. Easy mode seems to be the same, or actually
       | even harder. I don't even get to the point where memory becomes
       | an issue, but at this pace I don't want to.
       | 
       | Maybe I'm getting old, and I get that being an OS is stressful,
       | but so is my job. I don't need another one!
       | 
       | With more forgiving pacing that starts out easy and then
       | increases to keeps just outside of my comfort zone, this could be
       | a very fun game.
        
         | bloggie wrote:
         | I had this same problem, where a process gets killed while
         | waiting for an IO event that never came. All of the killed
         | processes were killed in this state! Seems that there's no way
         | to prevent this if it happens.
        
           | thatsnotmepls wrote:
           | You have to click on I/O at the top when it goes from (0) to
           | (1).
        
             | bloggie wrote:
             | The thing is processes get killed before the IO event
             | appears.
        
         | aio2 wrote:
         | That's what computers are for, doing the repetitive stuff
         | without freaking out for you :)
        
           | cptnapalm wrote:
           | Maybe write a program that plays the game for you. It could
           | be called You're the Operating System Operating System.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | bijoo wrote:
       | My results: uptime: 7:44 score: 259513 mode: easy
       | 
       | How did yours compare?
        
         | zer8k wrote:
         | 6:15 174612 on normal mode.
         | 
         | Strangely fun.
        
       | mlfreeman wrote:
       | Somehow this needs to be linked to PsDoom
       | (https://psdoom.sourceforge.net/), perhaps as "multiplayer" mode
       | of some sort?
        
       | carreau wrote:
       | Now, I want to write a program the play that game...
        
       | sandworm101 wrote:
       | Total nostalgia for the days when an OS cared about the user.
       | Moving memory pages around is all well and good, but a realworld
       | OS has far more important functions than responding to the
       | demands of the user. I suggest adding a dimension whereby the
       | player must respond to the wishes of the OS creator/owner. Have
       | the OS be asked to inject ads into content. The OS could slowly
       | depreciate itself in order to upsell the user on the next
       | version. The OS should detect un-friendly activity by the user
       | and brick itself and/or report the user as a "pirate". Or the OS
       | could be asked to respond to FBI/NSA requests to spy on the user.
        
       | Waterluvian wrote:
       | I'm half a sentence into this website and I'm already completely
       | on board.
       | 
       | One of the best ways to grok a problem like this. "Hey now you're
       | the memory manager. Good luck."
       | 
       | I love this idea so much. I bet it could be dressed up in a cute
       | way where it's a take on the restaurant management sim. But the
       | restaurant is a computer and your customers are the resources.
       | 
       | Human Resource Machine was great this way. I remember at one
       | point thinking, "wait, did I just make a linked list?"
        
       | Terr_ wrote:
       | This seems related to a larger genre of "hectic customer service"
       | games, often involving idiosyncratically demanding customers at a
       | restaurant limited by time and resources.
       | 
       | In fact, several of them have been rather explicit about the idea
       | of humans subordinated into thankless jobs for machines,
       | considering titles like "Sushi For Robots" or "Human Resource
       | Machine".
        
       | CaesarA wrote:
       | In idea, this reminds of the old game Core Wars and its special
       | "Red Code" programming language.
        
       | rkagerer wrote:
       | It needs ways to upgrade your computer to live longer.
        
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       (page generated 2023-08-14 23:02 UTC)