Postby JeffHuang » Thu May 25, 2017 4:27 pm
Can anyone create the game described here? It seems simple enough.
"Some of the games they knew; some they had even played at home. Simple ones and
hard ones. Ender walked past the two-dimensional games on video and began to study the
games the bigger boys played, the holographic games with objects hovering in the air. He
was the only Launchy in that part of the room, and every now and then one of the bigger
boys would shove him out of the way. What're you doing here? Get lost. Fly off. And of
course he would fly, in the lower gravity here, leave his feet and soar until he ran into
something or someone.
Every time, though, he extricated himself and went back, perhaps to a different spot, to
get a different angle on the game. He was too small to see the controls, how the game was
actually done. That didn't matter. He got the movement of it in the air. The way the
player dug tunnels in the darkness, tunnels of light, which the enemy ships would search
for and then follow mercilessly until they caught the player's ship. The player could make
traps: mines, drifting bombs, loops in the air that forced the enemy ships to repeat
endlessly. Some of the players were clever. Others lost quickly.
Ender liked it better, though, when two boys played against each other. Then they had to
use each other's tunnels, and it quickly became clear which of them were worth anything
at the strategy of it.
Within an hour or so, it began to pall. Ender understood the regularities by then.
Understood the rules the computer was following, so that he knew he could always, once
he mastered the controls, outmaneuver the enemy. Spirals when the enemy was like this;
loops when the enemy was like that. Lie in wait at one trap. Lay seven traps and then lure
them like this. There was no challenge to it, then, just a matter of playing until the
computer got so fast that no human reflexes could overcome it. That wasn't fun. It was
the other boys he wanted to play. The boys who had been so trained by the computer that
even when they played against each other they each tried to emulate the computer. Think
like a machine instead of a boy. "