Re: [-empyre-] sidebar - continued discussion between John Klimaand Bill Seaman - part 2

[CP <clp404-newsletters@yahoo.com.au>]

> Isn't gaming also the field where programming gets 'dirty' in the sense that
> gaming programmers leave running threads all over the place while designing,
> till at a next take on the project someone points to a 'dead' character
> still kicking the wall and says hey that's funny let's do something with the
> garbage? Aren't these kind of events in teams or in the individual
> programmer exactly the same as what happens when you write 'traditionally'?

I haven't worked in a team of games programmers, but have friends who have. In doom the dead monster always faced the player - but these were things 'to be fixed'. Games programming does get dirty when the structure of the rules at play change in significant amounts. Usually, but not always, elements or objects are revised, started again, or dumped in subsequent revisions. It is a mark of good programming that enables disorder to rise so that its (persisting) influence can be absorbed in a later (new/modified) structure.

> Another phenomenon that i personally have experienced is that when you write
> very intensely and when as a consequence of this intensity a poem gets to
> see the light of day that really prooves when read that it needed to exist,
> that it has the kind of inevitability to it that establishes it beyond doubt
> as a 'good' poem, that when this has happened you actually don't remember a
> thing of how you got there, you do not remember anything from creation time.
> I suspect a similar orgastic process of creation happens to game developers,
> i'm too new to programming to attest to it, but as an experienced writer you
> know it's there waiting to happen.

For me elegence and modularity are signs of poetry in programming - when faced with a seemingly complex set of events I needed to play out in the game I'm writing - it was refreshening to be able to write a brilliant 'one-liner' of code that spawned a dozen already written objects. When profoundness and weight can be condensed into one poetic line, then we know it is similiar to a spell in which one incites deep levels of affect.

> With painting or drawing  it's all different, i feel. After getting into
> (amateurish but obsessed) painting for a week or two i can't program the
> simplest servlet without hard headache. It's a different process all
> together, i guess it has to do with different parts of the brain,
> neurologically.

Similarly, the first day after a week of 'non-coding' (usually sculptural stuff) time is always the hardest. Its not that I forget to code - its just that my sense of organization and structure required for coding is different. First day coding, I will try to do too much in one method - realizing that its messy and leads to hard-to-find errors, day two is spent extracting the mess.

> What is the case here is quite simply that code=text and similar thought or
> inputs lead to similar programming (styles) or writing (styles). The only
> difference is perhaps that the commercial machine dictates one kind of
> coding (OOP) and makes it financially nearly impossible to experiment with
> alternatives, at least not with the same resources. 

I keep thinking about how objects, or collections of objects in programming could represent 'States of Consciousness' that is itself a meta-object. Could one write conduits inbetween the gaps of objects that are 'universal', that distribute something iconic and meaningful to all objects in that family? Perhaps, as a way of creating patterns, reinforcing patterns, death of neglected patterns, that informs how the objects relate to each other.
 Even if it were merely a 'throttle' for possible relations between objects. This object talks apples, this one pears, but can interact through a third object, etc.

Chris Poole