Worldbuilding Wednesday #8: Videogames (Patreon)

Awesome Games Done Quick '17 is running as we speak, so it only seems appropriate to discuss the computer entertainment industry of Flora.

An ongoing trait of Flora's technological advances is its abstract path development when compared to ours, as the addition of magic leads to certain... shortcuts that would not obviously occur to us. For instance, teleportation and hologram interfaces via charms have been commonplace for them for centuries, whereas the concept of escalators and fullcolor liquid crystal screens are considered highly experimental tech.

It's no different for computers and videogames. While both simple analog and magical calculating devices were already a widespread thing, the first tremendous breakthrough in programming came about by accident, in a way that would seem alien by our standards. A travelling pilgrim, frustrated at his inability to meditate in some of the more hectic environments he visited, attempted to duplicate his garden within a small pocket space that he could then astrally project into, to sit in peace. 

While this lack in spiritual discipline was met with some degree of derision amongst his peers, it caught the attention of a bright young rabbit, who realized that the existing pocket space could be tweaked using outside charms, creating a wholly new, self-contained simulated space. With a cobbled together interface, even a person without the trained ability to astrally project could interact with such an artificial environment, essentially creating virtual reality technology without any prior knowledge of programming. These simulated environments could be broken down into smaller chunks and further abstracted, giving rise to proper operating systems and dedicated tools for creating virtual environments and scenarios.

So compared to our own development of computers, acheived through steady growth of a simple concept over time, Florans discovered a complex concept by accident using magic, then quickly reverse-engineered it into a more practical state.

Over time, computers became more commercial, as they do. You could buy a small computing device, comprised of thousands of layers of charms contained a spherical casing, plug in a small marble representing a simulation, and then dive into it using a soul patch (those things birds use to make hands, if you've forgotten). Simulations quickly got boring, and were tweaked into more fantastic scenarios to indulge in power fantasies. But this format put strain on the user over time, people would suffer headaches from interfacing too long, and there were cases of overimmersion leading to dangerous addiction and self-neglect. It was around this point that developers started breaking away from the first-person viewpoint these simulations had used up to this point, and began experimenting with more abstract formats closer to our own videogames. 

Videogames became less personal and more social. The action moved away from contained spaces, and began being projected in holograms and on screens. Interfaces became more abstracted and less physically demanding, moving to hand-based controllers that used holographic buttons to fit any hand type. Since the technologies essentially developed in reverse, what seems standard to us is novel to them and vice versa. Of course, so far, opossums are mostly out of luck on getting any sort of non-magical interface support to play games from any of the major hardware companies, leaving it up to the mad cats in the third-party peripheral industry to pick up the slack.

Oh, and in case anyone was wondering, the currently most popular genres of game are rhythm and reflexive puzzle games, which appeal to almost every species universally. 

Next week, I'll be talking more about computers and specifically, the internet as Flora knows it.