Pixel Game Quotes

If I was feeling depressed or frustrated about my lot in life, all I had to do was tap the Player One button, and my worries would instantly slip away as my mind focused itself on the relentless pixelated onslaught on the screen in front of me. There, inside the game's two-dimensional universe, life was simple: It's just you against the machine. Move with your left hand, shoot with your right, and try to stay alive as long as possible.

One surefire way to annoy a game developer is to ask, in response to discovering his or her chosen career path, what it’s like to spend all day playing video games.

A girl needs options. To me, video games are like shoes. But with more pixels and a plot.

Making a game is like constructing a building during an earthquake or trying to run a train as someone else is laying down track as you go...

If I was feeling depressed or frustrated about my lot in life, all I had to do was tap the Player One button, and my worries would instantly slip away as my mind focused itself on the relentless pixelated onslaught on the screen in front of me.

Oh, Jason", he said. "It's a miracle that any game is made".

The biggest differentiator between a studio that creates a really high-quality game and a studio that doesn’t isn’t the quality of the team,” said one person who worked on Destiny. “It’s their dev tools. If you can take fifty shots on goal, and you’re a pretty shitty hockey player, and I can only take three shots on goal and I’m Wayne fucking Gretzky, you’re probably going to do better. That’s what tools are. It’s how fast can you iterate, how stable are they, how robust are they, how easy is it as a nontechnical artist to move a thing.

If you play a video game on your computer, such as "Doom" or "Uncharted", you see compelling 3D worlds with 3D objects. Yet the information is entirely 2D, limited by the number of pixels on the screen. The same is true when you look away from your computer to the world around you. It too has pixels, and all the information is 2D.

One of the biggest problems with long game development is, when you playtest the game for too long, you invent problems and you add layers to the game that don’t need to be added.

For just under $6 million, Obsidian had made one of 2015’s best RPGs, a game that would go on to win several awards and help secure Obsidian’s future as an independent studio.

While most people seem to think that game development is about ‘having great ideas,’ it’s really more about the skill of taking great ideas from paper to product,

Max turned to her. “I learned it when we did our debate in class. Weren’t you paying any attention?” Zoe gave him a flat look. “Have I ever?” Max smirked. “You have a point there.

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made, by Jason Schreier;

The standard burn rate for a game studio was $10,000 per person per month, a number that included both salaries and overhead costs, like health insurance and office rent.

Isn’t that one of the reasons we love video games in the first place? That feeling of surprise when you pick up a controller and know you’re about to experience something totally new?

Here’s an alternative theory: every single video game is made under abnormal circumstances. Video games straddle the border between art and technology in a way that was barely possible just a few decades ago.

Yes, Barone said. He was thinking he might make a game about catching bugs. I asked how long he thought it might take. “I’m trying to be a little more realistic this time around,” Barone said. “I’m hoping it takes two years.

Indie game developers couldn’t just slap their games on Steam and call it a day, though: they needed to get Valve’s explicit approval. This was a problem. Barone didn’t know anyone at Valve. He didn’t have any publishing contacts.

Traditionally, independent studios like Obsidian and Double Fine had three ways to stay afloat: (1) finding investors, (2) signing contracts with publishers to make games, or (3) funding their own video games with war chests they’d hoarded via options one and two.

Steam Greenlight. With Greenlight, Valve crowdsourced its approval process, allowing fans to vote on the games they’d want to play. Games that hit a certain number of votes (a number that the famously secretive Valve kept quiet) would automatically get a spot in the store.

a new console generation was on the way, but analysts and pundits were predicting that console gaming was doomed thanks to the rise of iPhones and iPads. Publishers didn’t want to invest tens of millions of dollars into big games without knowing that people would actually buy the next-generation Xbox One and PS4.*

Most video games are built by teams of dozens of people, each of whom specializes in fields like art, programming, design, or music. Some games, like Uncharted 4, employ staffs in the hundreds and use work from outsourced artists across the world. Even small independent developers usually rely on contractors and third-party game engines.

Player One button, and my worries would instantly slip away as my mind focused itself on the relentless pixelated onslaught on the screen in front of me. There, inside the game’s two-dimensional universe, life was simple: It’s just you against the machine. Move with your left hand, shoot with your right, and try to stay alive as long as possible.

By reading pixel art theory and watching guides on YouTube, Barone figured out how to compose each sprite by drawing individual pixels. He knew nothing about complicated video game lighting techniques, but he learned how to fake them, drawing semitransparent white circles that he’d place behind torches and candles to evoke the illusion that they were brightening rooms.

I think the real story of Destiny’s development is that just making any game is incredibly hard,” said Jaime Griesemer. “Trying to make an ambitious game under a lot of pressure is staggeringly hard. . . . When you have just quantic explosions and craterings and huge assimilation and communication problems on a team, you end up wasting so many resources and so much time that you see it in the final game.

Every game is delayed at least once. Every game developer must make tough compromises. Every company must sweat over which hardware and technology to use. Every studio must build its schedules around big trade shows like E3, where developers will draw motivation (and even feedback) from throngs of excited fans. And, most controversially, everyone who makes video games has to crunch, sacrificing personal lives and family time for a job that seems to never end.

Your team had to crunch for at least a month before each major milestone (E3, alpha, beta, etc.) and even though you bought them all dinners to make up for it, you still can’t stop thinking about the missed anniversaries, the lost birthday parties, and the evenings they didn’t get to spend with their kids because they were stuck in meetings about the best color schemes for your plumber’s overalls. Is there a way to make great video games without that sort of sacrifice? Is it possible to develop a game without putting in endless hours? Will there ever be a reliable formula for making games that allows for more predictable schedules?

these sources were particularly helpful to my thinking about and understanding of 1990s- and 2000s-era game culture and designers: Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made, by Jason Schreier; Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, by David Kushner; Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (specifically the section on Sierra On-Line), by Steven Levy; A Mind Forever Voyaging: A History of Storytelling in Video Games, by Dylan Holmes; Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, by Tom Bissell; All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture, by Harold Goldberg;

Perhaps because of this unusual structure, Naughty Dog took an abnormal approach to detail. If you look closely at any scene in Uncharted 4, you’ll spot something extraordinary—the creases on Drake’s shirt; the stitches on his buttons; the way he pulls the leather strap over his head when he equips a rifle. These details didn’t pop up out of the ether. They emerged from a studio full of people obsessive enough to add them to the game, even if it meant staying at the office until 3:00 a.m. “We’ll take it as far as we possibly can,” said Phil Kovats, the audio lead. “We all wanted to make sure that, because this was the last Nathan Drake game we were making, it was going to go out with as much stuff as we possibly could.

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made, by Jason Schreier; Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, by David Kushner; Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (specifically the section on Sierra On-Line), by Steven Levy; A Mind Forever Voyaging: A History of Storytelling in Video Games, by Dylan Holmes; Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, by Tom Bissell; All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture, by Harold Goldberg; and the documentaries Indie Game: The Movie, directed by James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot, and GTFO, directed by Shannon Sun-Higginson. I read Indie Games by Bounthavy Suvilay after I finished writing, and it’s a beautiful book for those looking to see how artful games can be.

During those last few months, the writer Patrick Weekes would take builds of Inquisition home and let his nine-year-old son play around with the game. His son was obsessed with mounting and dismounting the horse, which Weekes found amusing. One night, Weekes’ son came up and said he’d been killed by a bunch of spiders, which seemed strange—his son’s characters were too high a level to be dying to spiders. Confused, Weekes loaded up the game, and sure enough, a group of spiders had annihilated his son’s party. After some poking around, Weekes figured out the problem: if you dismounted the horse in the wrong place, all your companions’ gear would disappear. “It was because my son liked the horse so much more than anyone else had ever or will ever like the horse,” Weekes said. “I doubt we would’ve seen it, because it takes spamming the button to figure out there’s a one-in-one-thousand chance that if you’re in the right place, it’s going to wipe out your party members.

Bungie, like many large studios, dedicated a great deal of time to what could technically be called “preproduction” but what was really just the act of figuring out what their next game was going to be. That was one of the most challenging parts of making any game—narrowing the possibilities down from infinity to one. “I think that’s one of the things that plagued Destiny’s development,” said Jaime Griesemer. “We would work for a while, spend a lot of money in one direction, and then because there was this sort of impossible ideal of, ‘We’re following up the biggest game of all time, and this has to be the new biggest game of all time,’ there were several points in development where there was a total reset. And it wasn’t a graceful, ‘We go to prototype and that direction is wrong so we’re going to backtrack a little bit and go in a different direction.’ It was, I came back in from going on vacation for a week and everything I had worked on for a year was deleted. Unrecoverably, literally deleted. If I hadn’t had a copy on my laptop, it would’ve been gone forever. With no warning, no discussion, no nothing.

It’s easy for you to tell what it’s a photo of, but to program a function that inputs nothing but the colors of all the pixels of an image and outputs an accurate caption such as “A group of young people playing a game of frisbee” had eluded all the world’s AI researchers for decades. Yet a team at Google led by Ilya Sutskever did precisely that in 2014. Input a different set of pixel colors, and it replies “A herd of elephants walking across a dry grass field,” again correctly. How did they do it? Deep Blue–style, by programming handcrafted algorithms for detecting frisbees, faces and the like? No, by creating a relatively simple neural network with no knowledge whatsoever about the physical world or its contents, and then letting it learn by exposing it to massive amounts of data. AI visionary Jeff Hawkins wrote in 2004 that “no computer can…see as well as a mouse,” but those days are now long gone.

Computer vision (CV) is the subbranch of AI that focuses on the problem of teaching computers to see. The word “see” here does not mean just the act of acquiring a video or image, but also making sense of what a computer sees. Computer vision includes the following capabilities in increasing complexity: Image capturing and processing—use cameras and other sensors to capture real-world 3D scenes in a video. Each video is composed of a sequence of images, and each image is a two-dimensional array of numbers representing the color, where each number is a “pixel.” Object detection and image segmentation—divide the image into prominent regions and find where the objects are. Object recognition—recognizes the object (for example, a dog), and also understands the details (German Shepherd, dark brown, and so on). Object tracking—follows moving objects in consecutive images or video. Gesture and movement recognition—recognize movements, like a dance move in an Xbox game. Scene understanding—understands a full scene, including subtle relationships, like a hungry dog looking at a bone.

MSI Modern 14 B5M Laptop Review The MSI Modern 14 B5M Laptop is an excellent choice for any gamer. The laptop has an impressive Intel Core i7 processor and 16 GB of RAM which means it can run most current games on high settings. The resolution is also higher than most laptops, which allows for a crisp, high-quality image. Other features include a 10-point touchscreen, a fingerprint scanner, and a backlit keyboard. 1. What does the MSI Modern 14 B5M have to offer? The MSI Modern 14 B5M is a great laptop for those that want to play video games. It has an Intel Core i7 processor and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics card. It also has 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD. It has a 15.6" 1080p display with a 144 Hz refresh rate. This laptop also has a backlit keyboard, which is perfect for typing in dark rooms. If you're looking for a laptop that can play video games, the MSI Modern 14 B5M is a great choice. 2. What are the specs of the MSI Modern 14 B5M? The MSI Modern 14 B5M is a powerful laptop with a very sleek design. It is equipped with a 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7-4700HQ quad-core processor and a dedicated NVIDIA GeForce GTX 745M graphics card. The MSI Modern 14 B5M also has a 256 GB SSD and a 1 TB HDD. It has a 14.0-inch screen and a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. The battery life is up to 8 hours. 3. How does the MSI Modern 14 B5M run games? The MSI Modern 14 B5M Laptop is a great gaming laptop. It has a quad core Intel Core i7 processor and it can run games at 1080p. It also has a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 graphics card. This means that the MSI Modern 14 B5M is a great laptop for playing games. It also has a battery life of up to 9 hours and 16 minutes. The price is a little high, but you are getting a lot of value for your money. 4. Conclusion. MSI is a very popular brand and they offer a wide variety of laptops. They have a wide range of laptops from business class to gaming. This laptop is a great choice for someone who is looking for a laptop that is powerful but still affordable. This laptop is also a good choice for someone who is looking for a laptop that is powerful but still affordable. Read More - anygadgetreview.com

MSI Modern 14 B5M Laptop Review The MSI Modern 14 B5M Laptop is an excellent choice for any gamer. The laptop has an impressive Intel Core i7 processor and 16 GB of RAM which means it can run most current games on high settings. The resolution is also higher than most laptops, which allows for a crisp, high-quality image. Other features include a 10-point touchscreen, a fingerprint scanner, and a backlit keyboard. 1. What does the MSI Modern 14 B5M have to offer? The MSI Modern 14 B5M is a great laptop for those that want to play video games. It has an Intel Core i7 processor and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics card. It also has 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD. It has a 15.6" 1080p display with a 144 Hz refresh rate. This laptop also has a backlit keyboard, which is perfect for typing in dark rooms. If you're looking for a laptop that can play video games, the MSI Modern 14 B5M is a great choice. 2. What are the specs of the MSI Modern 14 B5M? The MSI Modern 14 B5M is a powerful laptop with a very sleek design. It is equipped with a 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7-4700HQ quad-core processor and a dedicated NVIDIA GeForce GTX 745M graphics card. The MSI Modern 14 B5M also has a 256 GB SSD and a 1 TB HDD. It has a 14.0-inch screen and a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. The battery life is up to 8 hours. 3. How does the MSI Modern 14 B5M run games? The MSI Modern 14 B5M Laptop is a great gaming laptop. It has a quad core Intel Core i7 processor and it can run games at 1080p. It also has a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 graphics card. This means that the MSI Modern 14 B5M is a great laptop for playing games. It also has a battery life of up to 9 hours and 16 minutes. The price is a little high, but you are getting a lot of value for your money. 4. Conclusion. MSI is a very popular brand and they offer a wide variety of laptops. They have a wide range of laptops from business class to gaming. This laptop is a great choice for someone who is looking for a laptop that is powerful but still affordable. This laptop is also a good choice for someone who is looking for a laptop that is powerful but still affordable.

Hang Yu

If Steve is not careful, his metaphysical musings will turn theological. Steve might form a belief in a “Programmer,” a being with the capability of programming pixels in such a way as to result in a law-governed world.

To think is to find patterns in the elements, or a program among the pixels.

If Steve is not careful, his metaphysical musings will turn theological. Steve might form a belief in a “Programmer,” a being with the capability of programming pixels in such a way as to result in a law-governed world. For certainly, if the field metaphysic is true, nothing in Steve’s world would be capable of doing this, since everything in Steve’s world is itself a product of the field metaphysic. The Programmer would have to exist beyond time and space, with powers that would be omnipotent, in Steve’s understanding. This Programmer, for whatever reason, saw it was right and good to create Steve and his world with a wonderful economy of causes and laws that reflected the Programmer’s own creative glory. And so Steve might then go on to found the First Temple of Notch, and sing praises unto the creator of this best of all possible worlds. . . . Of course, we know that Steve is basically right in these conclusions—at least, we know that there truly is a programmer of his world, or a team of them. But Steve does not know what we know, and he might be a bit more cautious in his reasoning.

To me, video games are like shoes. But with more pixels and a plot.

DNA

Is there a way to make great video games without that sort of sacrifice? Is it possible to develop a game without putting in endless hours? Will there ever be a reliable formula for making games that allows for more predictable schedules?

What makes it really hard is you can build a game, you can test a game, and you can think you know the game—until you release it,

Like many game creators, Velasco found himself dealing with a heavy dose of postproject depression and imposter syndrome. “I [thought], ‘Oh, who even cares, we just ripped off Mega Man,’” he said. “We fooled people into liking this. I’m not even really good at this.

It’s a common dilemma in game development: when you’re working on the same game for years, you’ll inevitably get bored. It’s tempting to make changes just for the sake of making changes, to spice things up because you’re sick of using the same simple control scheme when you get into work every day.

Soon after the West Coast Computer Faire, where we introduced the Apple II, a couple of other ready-to-use personal computers came out. One was the Radio Shack TRS-80, and the other was Commodore’s PET. These would become our direct competitors. But it was the Apple II that ended up kicking off the whole personal computer revolution. It had lots of firsts. Color was the big one. I designed the Apple II so it would work with the color TV you already owned. And it had game control paddles you could attach to it, and sound built in. That made it the first computer people wanted to design arcade-style games for, the first computer with sound and paddles ready to go. The Apple II even had a high-resolution mode where a game programmer could draw special little shapes really quickly. You could program every single pixel on the screen—whether it was on or off or what color it was—and that was something you could never do before with a low-cost computer. At first that mode didn’t mean a lot, but eventually it was a huge step toward the kinds of computer gaming you see today, where everything is high-res. Where the graphics can be truly realistic. The fact that it worked with your home TV made the total cost a lot lower than any competitors could do. It came with a real keyboard to type on—a normal keyboard—and that was a big deal. And the instant you turned it on, it was running BASIC in ROM.

In the early 2010s, Nvidia—the designer of graphic chips—began hearing rumors of PhD students at Stanford using Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) for something other than graphics. GPUs were designed to work differently from standard Intel or AMD CPUs, which are infinitely flexible but run all their calculations one after the other. GPUs, by contrast, are designed to run multiple iterations of the same calculation at once. This type of “parallel processing,” it soon became clear, had uses beyond controlling pixels of images in computer games. It could also train AI systems efficiently.

Block has been writing unofficial Minecraft-inspired fanfiction since 2015 and is the author of over 100 books and collections. His most popular books are the Diary of a Surfer Villager (where Jimmy and his friends go on adventures), the Ballad of Winston the Wandering Trader, and Baby Zeke: Diary of a Chicken Jockey. When he’s not writing books or playing video games, Dr. Block likes to spend his time surfing near his house, gardening in his backyard, and spending time with his wife and two teenage children. Although Dr. Block is not

Fang.

Zoe! Wait!” Max shouted, dashing out of the room after her. Side by side, they stood at the door, panting hard. “We can’t open it without Dad here,” Max said. “Oh, come on. Look!” Zoe pointed out the narrow window beside the door. “There’s nobody out there. Just a package.” “Zoe . . . it’s the rule. We can’t break the rule.” Zoe put her hands on her hips. “Look, the rule is there to stop us from opening the door for people. It’s not a person, it’s a package.” She gasped, her hand slapping over her mouth and her eyes widening.

Pure white, so bright it made them squint, with black stars dotting it like a paintbrush had been whipped across the landscape.

The huge arrows split into three when launched and exploded when they hit.

Like a horse, but twice the size, it was solid black,

That cat. I was hoping being in a video game would make his farts stink less. If anything, they’re worse.”  Mom cocked an eyebrow at Dad. “You know I don’t like that word.”  Dad rolled his eyes. “Sorry, his TOOTS are stinky enough to do the mining for me.

With success came pressure to keep making the game better.

Why do you say actually like I'm not full of good ideas?” Max crossed his arms and looked at her. “Mentos.” “That was one time! I had no idea it would make such a big mess.” “You knew exactly what it would do! You were the one that watched the videos! You saw how big the soda exploded.” Zoe pointed at him. “You went along with it.” “I didn’t know what I was getting into!” Zoe shrugged. “It’s not my fault you didn’t watch the videos with me. Besides, it was still cool.” “Sure, it was cool. Until we were cleaning soda off the ceiling!

Oh, you're feisty,

Someday, if we’re lucky, an entirely new industry will steal from us. They’ll transform our work into something so unimaginably different, we’ll feel like Errol Flynn confronted with his future pixelated form.

Zorlda: A Link to the Lost.

Dad shook his head. “That cat, I was hoping being in a video game would make his farts stink less. If anything, they’re worse.”  Mom cocked an eyebrow at Dad. “You know I don’t like that word.”  Dad rolled his eyes. “Sorry, his TOOTS are stinky enough to do the mining for me.

wish it was a thing. I’d love a personal tacobot. Way better than a nutri-brick. Ibby: Hey, are you insulting me? Zoe: Never! Ibby: Good. Max: You should look into a sarcasm update. Ibby: What?

Zoe: So... your passing gas and it smells like tacos? Ibby: ... Ibby: ... Ibby: ... Ibby: ... just... why? Ibby has closed the chat

Your ship . . . why do I get the feeling there’s a lot more to that ship than you’ve been letting on?” Zoe coughed into her hand. “Well. Uh. Maybe there is. Ibby is more than just a ship. She’s . . .” “She?” Cara raised an eyebrow. Max grimaced and cleared his throat. “Yeah . . . She is kind of . . . alive.” Bill buried his face in his hands.

This is Mom we’re talking about. It’s not a piece of loot, not some video game character.

The trick to getting a good-looking pixel art game is to pay attention to the orthographic camera size with respect to the resolution, and make sure the artwork looks good at a certain PPU. In our game, we’re going to use a resolution of 1280 × 720 but we’ll use a trick to scale up the art a bit. We’re going to multiply the PPU by a scaling factor of 3. Our modified equation will look like this: (Vertical resolution / (PPU * Scaling factor)) * 0.5 = Camera Size Using a resolution of 1280 × 720 and a PPU of 32: (720 / (32 PPU * 3)) * 0.5 = 3.75 Camera Size This is why we set our camera size to be 3.75 earlier.

As you walk the player around the map, you may notice a slight jittering effect . The jittering is especially pronounced when you stop walking and the virtual camera damping slowly brings the tracking to a halt. This jittering effect is due to overly precise camera coordinates. The camera is tracking the player but it’s moving to subpixel positions, whereas the player is only moving around from pixel to pixel. We made sure of that when we did the calculations for the Orthographic Camera size earlier. To fix this jittering, we want to force the final Cinemachine Virtual Camera position to stay within pixel boundaries. We’re going to script a simple “extension” component that we’ll add to the Cinemachine Virtual Camera. Our extension component will grab the last coordinates of the Cinemachine Virtual Camera and round them to a value that lines up with our PPU.

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The file began with the principal muttering what sounded like nonsense. “Stupid hedgehogs!” he yelled. “Stop stealing my flapjacks!” I looked to Zoe, intrigued. “Is this some sort of top secret code?” “No,” Zoe replied. “It’s about the game he’s playing on his phone.” “It’s called Flapjack Frenzy,” Warren explained. “You try to make as many pancakes as possible and these hedgehogs try to steal them. So you have to fight them off by shooting them with maple syrup. . . .” “The rules of the game really aren’t important right now,” Zoe told him. Warren frowned sullenly. On the recording, the principal’s phone rang. He let it ring ten more times while he apparently tried to finish the level of the game, before finally giving in and answering. “This is the principal,” he said curtly. “This had better be important. I’m in the midst of something very serious.” Then he gasped in surprise and asked, “SPYDER? Really? How do you know?” This was followed by a period during which the principal was obviously listening to a lot of information that the person on the other end of the phone line was giving him. For the most part, it seemed he was trying to sound interested, saying things like “Hmmm” and “Fascinating” and “Wow,” although I could also hear the distinct sounds of the game continuing: tinny music punctuated by the occasional squelch of maple syrup and squeal of pixelated hedgehogs. Suddenly, the principal said, “No, I’m not playing a game on my phone! I’m listening to you!” And then the tinny music shut off.

During those last few months, the writer Patrick Weekes would take builds of Inquisition home and let his nine-year-old son play around with the game. His son was obsessed with mounting and dismounting the horse, which Weekes found amusing. One night, Weekes’ son came up and said he’d been killed by a bunch of spiders, which seemed strange—his son’s characters were too high a level to be dying to spiders. Confused, Weekes loaded up the game, and sure enough, a group of spiders had annihilated his son’s party.

Truth is, we all project a false front to the world, peppering our social media pages with witty words and silly emoticons. Life narrowed down to 140 characters, staged selfies, and tirades over opinion posts. Life lived for the approval of the masses, all while tearing strangers down for the slightest misstep. And when you turn away from that electric glow, when you no longer see those silent, pixelated opinions, who are you, really? Who do you see in the mirror? When did the regard of those unknown masses become your existence? Those who will never be there for you except to judge.

Hmm,” said Tammy, “and once more your naive optimism regarding the human species reveals its hopeless disconnect with reality. While it was well-established that prior to the Great EM Pulse following the Benefactors’ arrival in Earth orbit, virtually every human being on the planet had already become a drooling automaton with bloodshot eyes glued to a pixelated screen, even as the world melted around them in a toxic stew of air pollution, water pollution, vehicles pouring out carcinogenic waste gases, and leaking gas pipelines springing up everywhere along with earthquake-inducing fracking and oil spills in the oceans and landslides due to deforestation and heat waves due to global warming and ice caps melting and islands and coastlines drowning and forests dying and idiots building giant walls and—” “All right, whatever!” Hadrian snapped. “But don’t you see? This is the future!” “Yeah, that statement makes sense.” “The future from then, I mean. Now is their future, even if it’s our now, or will be, I mean—oh fuck it. The point is, Tammy, we’re supposed to have matured as a species, as a civilization. We’re supposed to have united globally in a warm gush of integrity, ethical comportment, and peace and love as our next stage of universal consciousness bursts forth like a blinding light to engulf us all in a golden age of enlightenment and postscarcity well-being.” “Hahahaha,” Tammy laughed and then coughed and choked. “Stop! You’re killing me!” Beta spoke. “I am attempting to compute said golden age, Captain. Alas, my Eternally Needful Consumer Index is redlining and descending into a cursive loop of existential panic. All efforts to reset parameters yield the Bluescreen of Incomprehension. Life without mindless purchase? Without pointless want? Without ephemeral endorphin spurts? Without gaming-induced frontal lobe permanent degradation resulting in short-tempered antisocial short-attention-span psychological generational profiles? Impossible.” “The EMP should have given us the breathing space to pause and reevaluate our value system,” said Hadrian. “Instead, it was universal panic. Riots in Discount Super Stores, millions trampled—they barely noticed the lights going out, for crying out loud.

Jack spoke up. “Well, we only played a little, like 20 or 30 hours maybe.” “20 hours!?” Mom shouted. “You spent an entire day playing a video game?!” “What?” Jack said. “That's not that much.

The best thing ever!” Jack exclaimed. “It’s a place with rides and food and games and fun things. Basically, all the best things you can think of in one place. It’s just so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so—” “We get it, Jack.” Dad eyed his son. “—so SO COOL! Can we, Dad? Can we build one? Pleeeeease?!