Author: Curt Doolittle

Games? Interesting. Let me think a bit….
Playing games in my era was probably quite a bit different from the past twenty years where ‘everybody’s doing it’. And overdoing it.
I think about games as a hobby that helped me think about AI, which helped me think about systems.
What I expect you and others don’t understand is (a) it was a smaller pouplation that could and did play games (b) I could work easily 14-16 hours a day endlessly. (c) and I was using gaming to ‘cool down’ from work. (d) and gaming was how I thought about AI development.
I built a lot of electronics including two primitive computers when I was young.
I played DnD in college when it first came out, and had up to 30 players for over two years. I think it’s how I learned to manage people.
I designed an adventure game in college in PL/I that ran on IBM360s that they tried to ban because it was using up so much student lab time. It was interesting because I had to build a random number generator because it didn’t have one.
When just out of college, I designed and wrote games in the early 80s for Tandy’ Color Computer. Including custom graphics and fonts. In Assembly language. (Which I still love)
After my first serious illness, I did AI research work starting with simulations and that’s when I understood the hardware problem wasn’t solvable with code.
After I sold a company, I tried to get id Software to license us Quake2 for an add on pack but failed.
I played Counter Strike competitively – but a long time ago. You can even still find two of the levels I made for it online:
de-ignorance
https://t.co/dDpS8LHVnq (major extension)
cs-knifeedge
https://t.co/gMHDj48hD8 (afghanistan)

I would come home from work and use games to ‘switch off’ the autism (change context).
Gaming was fun from the 80s, and especially when the quake era led to so much innovation, then through to about Skyrim in 2010, and I don’t think much of it after that.
I gave up games entirely when I gave up running big companies. Because I didn’t need to shut down the autism any longer, and it was a vast sinkhole for time. Some people drink, some smoke, I played a game for an hour or two. After it came out, mostly CS and little else.
It’s also not obvious to most men what the dopamine depletion does to you. That wasn’t a problem with text and moves-per-round games. But with the advent of real time and hot-response gaming it basically functions as an addiction.

I approach everything I do in life as a science experiment. And I wasn’t really conscious of how much so until the past few years. So games, software, companies, economies, legal systems, polities, and langauges, logics, epistemology? They’re all the same thing to me: a simulation. A game.

Now, real life humans in politics are the game I play. 😉
That’s the ‘great game’. 😉

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