![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
I didn't actually intend to follow this pathway. What I wanted to do was play games for hours upon end, exploring, leveling up, and otherwise gaining mastery over a plethora of games in different styles and genres, with no greater ambition than that.
The problem, of course, is that computer gaming in that era was intimately entwined with progression in computers and technology themselves, and therefore, to learn how to run and play games, you had to learn about the underlying computer components, and how it was all put together, and at least some amount about operating systems and the constraints they imposed, the ways to navigate a command line, the need for device drivers, and how file systems worked.
I learned more about computer systems by trying to play games on them than I would have from the other pursuits of technology that I was being encouraged to explore, including programming.
( And Away We Go )
I certainly didn't intend to become one, but everything that I've done in life, each of those tasks that I wanted to do, each of those games I wanted to play, they've all contributed to my becoming a member of the computer nerds. (Yes, Hardison, I hear you. Age of the Geek, yes, but many of those geeks turned out to be people who didn't have strong morals, had their morals easily swayed by the promise of lucre, or are working somewhere that does something they find objectionable or at least uneasy-making because capitalism prevents us all from working our perfect jobs and instead forces us to work in places that can pay enough to satisfy capitalism.)
I didn't actually intend to follow this pathway. What I wanted to do was play games for hours upon end, exploring, leveling up, and otherwise gaining mastery over a plethora of games in different styles and genres, with no greater ambition than that.
The problem, of course, is that computer gaming in that era was intimately entwined with progression in computers and technology themselves, and therefore, to learn how to run and play games, you had to learn about the underlying computer components, and how it was all put together, and at least some amount about operating systems and the constraints they imposed, the ways to navigate a command line, the need for device drivers, and how file systems worked.
I learned more about computer systems by trying to play games on them than I would have from the other pursuits of technology that I was being encouraged to explore, including programming.
( And Away We Go )
I certainly didn't intend to become one, but everything that I've done in life, each of those tasks that I wanted to do, each of those games I wanted to play, they've all contributed to my becoming a member of the computer nerds. (Yes, Hardison, I hear you. Age of the Geek, yes, but many of those geeks turned out to be people who didn't have strong morals, had their morals easily swayed by the promise of lucre, or are working somewhere that does something they find objectionable or at least uneasy-making because capitalism prevents us all from working our perfect jobs and instead forces us to work in places that can pay enough to satisfy capitalism.)
