Long ago I was exploring some MUD, and it was the usual fantasy game experience. But one area was basically a weird dimension representing the server itself. Instead of monsters it had zombie processes you could kill. And child processes looking at you sadly. Trying to kill them was one of those “top 10 video game moments that made you feel like a total monster” things.
This paper explores a novel interface to a system administration task. Instead of creating an interface de novo for the task, the author modified a popular computer game, Doom, to perform useful work. The game was chosen for its appeal to the target audience of system administrators.
The Doom process manager (PSDoom) is a modification of the game Doom [8] that displays representations of the processes running on a machine. Rather than using standard text-mode UNIX tools to view and manipulate processes, one surveys and shoots at a room full of bloodthirsty mutants, as shown in Figure 1. When a user starts PSDoom, currently running processes are instantiated as “process monsters” in a single room in a “dungeon.” These monsters have their associated process’ name and id printed on them. The program periodically polls the operating system to add newly-created processes to the game. The user may choose to view the processes from a balcony above the room, as shown in Figure 2, or to enter the room to interact with them. If the user inflicts a wound upon a process monster, the corresponding process’ priority is lowered to give it fewer CPU cycles. When the monster accumulates enough damage and is killed, the associated process is also killed.
Reminds me of the game that I believe was intended as a thought-provoking artwork. Every enemy that was killed deleted a file off the computer it was installed on. For real. No take backs. Zap that monster and the file’s gone.
Just looked it up and it’s called lose/lose and is for macOS circa 2009, but I could have sworn something similar existed in the Win95 era. (Although it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve thought something was from an earlier decade.)
Long ago I was exploring some MUD, and it was the usual fantasy game experience. But one area was basically a weird dimension representing the server itself. Instead of monsters it had zombie processes you could kill. And child processes looking at you sadly. Trying to kill them was one of those “top 10 video game moments that made you feel like a total monster” things.
https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html
Reminds me of the game that I believe was intended as a thought-provoking artwork. Every enemy that was killed deleted a file off the computer it was installed on. For real. No take backs. Zap that monster and the file’s gone.
Just looked it up and it’s called lose/lose and is for macOS circa 2009, but I could have sworn something similar existed in the Win95 era. (Although it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve thought something was from an earlier decade.)