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My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza

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Re: My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza

#21

Post by gyomu »

> Almost nobody programs computers in machine language. Mostly, programmers work in high-level programming languages that simplify many aspects of the job. Thanks to AI, I realized, English is just an extraordinarily high-level programming language. And vibe coding is coding.

It's funny how people feel the need to repeat that last mantra. Kind of similar to the "listening to audiobooks is reading" crowd.

Compare two high schoolers: one who vibe codes a game in English and generates the graphics with Nano Banana; vs one who actually learns how to program and draw to make the game.

Are they doing the same kind of activity? Getting the same kind of cognitive development out of it?

Re: My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza

#22

Post by wrongcards »

mrandish wrote: post #19
wrongcards wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I taught myself to program typing out games and apps from Rainbows magazines in the mid-eighties. I was obsessed with text-adventures, and creating my own, from about age eight and onward. Playing games back then was a wildly different experience; pre-internet, there was no way to find hints. You'd come to a wall, somehow, and be stuck. I never got to the end of Raaka-Tu, or Madness and the Minotaur, or Bedlam. I was…

> the first graphical RPG I ever played, Dungeons of Daggorath In case you didn't know Dungeons of Daggorath (1982) for the Radio Shack Color Computer featured significantly in the best-selling sci-fi book "Ready Player One" (although it was not an element in movie). https://readyplayerone.fandom.com/wiki/Dungeons_of_Daggorath I got my Color Computer in 1982 and banged my head on Daggorath for many hours. Randomly re…

I had the same experience when I read Ready Player One. Nearly fell out of my chair. But surely dozens of us must have played that game - dozens!

BTW you had to 'incant' a ring, near the end, and I could not have figured that out on my own. It was fantastically fun to me as a kid, despite being, lets be reasonable, impossible to beat without knowing some things outside the game. I actually believed I did beat it, in the late 90s, after I killed the 'false' wizard. However, I thought Level 4 was the game restarting back to Level 1, so exited, thinking it was all done.

Rainbow Magazines were magical and incredibly inspiring. I probably typed-up most of the games they ever published and had them saved on cassette. This one was very lengthy -> https://ia903403.us.archive.org/0/items/rainbowmagazine-1984.... (search for 'Karrak')

Sadly, my brother recorded over it before I could play it more than once ... you know, deliberately, out of pure 80s evil older-brother spite. Some part of me wants to paste that code into Claude Code, and generate some sort of working game, as an act of defiance.

I couldn't play joust on the cabinets (no money as a kid); the TRS-80 game was called Lancer. Good times, absolutely.

Re: My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza

#24

Post by TurdF3rguson »

gyomu wrote: post #21

> Almost nobody programs computers in machine language. Mostly, programmers work in high-level programming languages that simplify many aspects of the job. Thanks to AI, I realized, English is just an extraordinarily high-level programming language. And vibe coding is coding. It's funny how people feel the need to repeat that last mantra. Kind of similar to the "listening to audiobooks is reading" crowd. Compare two…

Sure but you could be saying that about calculators vs pen and paper math. At some point you will need to abandon this position.

Re: My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza

#25

Post by jimmaswell »

gyomu wrote: post #21

> Almost nobody programs computers in machine language. Mostly, programmers work in high-level programming languages that simplify many aspects of the job. Thanks to AI, I realized, English is just an extraordinarily high-level programming language. And vibe coding is coding. It's funny how people feel the need to repeat that last mantra. Kind of similar to the "listening to audiobooks is reading" crowd. Compare two…

> Kind of similar to the "listening to audiobooks is reading" crowd.

Is this supposed to be an implicit dig at audiobooks? The scientific consensus seems to be that there's no difference to comprehension or retention.

https://time.com/5388681/audiobooks-reading-books/

Re: My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza

#26

Post by gyomu »

TurdF3rguson wrote: post #24
gyomu wrote: post #21

> Almost nobody programs computers in machine language. Mostly, programmers work in high-level programming languages that simplify many aspects of the job. Thanks to AI, I realized, English is just an extraordinarily high-level programming language. And vibe coding is coding. It's funny how people feel the need to repeat that last mantra. Kind of similar to the "listening to audiobooks is reading" crowd. Compare two…

Sure but you could be saying that about calculators vs pen and paper math. At some point you will need to abandon this position.

I think it’s more like solving a math problem yourself (whether with tools like pen & paper, or a calculator), vs asking an AI agent to solve the problem for you.

Re: My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza

#27

Post by gyomu »

jimmaswell wrote: post #25
gyomu wrote: post #21

> Almost nobody programs computers in machine language. Mostly, programmers work in high-level programming languages that simplify many aspects of the job. Thanks to AI, I realized, English is just an extraordinarily high-level programming language. And vibe coding is coding. It's funny how people feel the need to repeat that last mantra. Kind of similar to the "listening to audiobooks is reading" crowd. Compare two…

> Kind of similar to the "listening to audiobooks is reading" crowd. Is this supposed to be an implicit dig at audiobooks? The scientific consensus seems to be that there's no difference to comprehension or retention. https://time.com/5388681/audiobooks-reading-books/

Well, we don’t say that “seeing” a theater play is the same as “reading” a theater play - regardless of comprehension or retention - so why should we say that “listening” to a book is the same as “reading” a book?

Re: My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza

#28

Post by TurdF3rguson »

gyomu wrote: post #26
TurdF3rguson wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but you could be saying that about calculators vs pen and paper math. At some point you will need to abandon this position.

I think it’s more like solving a math problem yourself (whether with tools like pen & paper, or a calculator), vs asking an AI agent to solve the problem for you.

Right but only because you've mentally tagged using a calculator with "doing it by yourself" and using AI as "not doing it by yourself". In both cases you are doing it by yourself in one sense and not doing it by yourself in another.

Re: My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza

#29

Post by atoav »

jimmaswell wrote: post #25
gyomu wrote: post #21

> Almost nobody programs computers in machine language. Mostly, programmers work in high-level programming languages that simplify many aspects of the job. Thanks to AI, I realized, English is just an extraordinarily high-level programming language. And vibe coding is coding. It's funny how people feel the need to repeat that last mantra. Kind of similar to the "listening to audiobooks is reading" crowd. Compare two…

> Kind of similar to the "listening to audiobooks is reading" crowd. Is this supposed to be an implicit dig at audiobooks? The scientific consensus seems to be that there's no difference to comprehension or retention. https://time.com/5388681/audiobooks-reading-books/

Yet it is not the same. The person who has read a thousand books is better at reading than the person who instead listened to them.

Re: My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza

#30

Post by chrisweekly »

gyomu wrote: post #27
jimmaswell wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kind of similar to the "listening to audiobooks is reading" crowd. Is this supposed to be an implicit dig at audiobooks? The scientific consensus seems to be that there's no difference to comprehension or retention. https://time.com/5388681/audiobooks-reading-books/

Well, we don’t say that “seeing” a theater play is the same as “reading” a theater play - regardless of comprehension or retention - so why should we say that “listening” to a book is the same as “reading” a book?

Drawing these distinctions is complicated by multi-modal consumption. As an avid lifelong reader (nearly a book per week for about 50 years) I greatly enjoy reading on my kindle and seamlessly switching to listening while driving or doing the dishes. With most books these days it's probably 80% reading -- but in the past, when I had a long commute, it was closer to 50/50. When discussing a given book with others, it's practically irrelevant whether I read or listened to the audiobook narration.

As for theater plays, attending a live performance with actors is fundamentally different from reading the script.

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