Today I want to write about a thing people who play lots of computer games notice right away about a game. To make it more fun, I am using Simple Writer to say just the ten hundred words people use the most often.
One thing you learn to look for right away if you play a lot of games is how the game world was made. Was it made by people or was it made by machines? It used to be that all game worlds were made by people. In the last thirty years, worlds have been made by machines more and more often.
A thing you notice about worlds made by people for other people to enjoy is that where the nice surprises are put has meaning. Usually when machines make worlds for people to enjoy, the nice surprises are still very nice, but are put here and there without thinking just where will be the most exciting. So if you can tell you are in a world made by people, you try hardest to look in places you think are exciting, and trust there might be a nice surprise waiting for you. But if you think you are in a world made by machines, you instead try to look in as many places as possible so you have more chances to find nice surprises.
In this way the real world acts like a world made by machines. People have not made the real world for other people to enjoy finding nice surprises, but for other very good reasons. Sometimes kind people put nice surprises in strange places people might look, but those nice surprises usually are not as good as money or power like they are in computer games. They are still nice!
The parts of the real world that people did not make were not made by machines either. They were there before people, and people who know how that old world works can find lots of nice surprises in it, if they learn a lot about how the old world and what you can find in it.
Worlds made by people for other people to enjoy can be really fun, because the people who made the world can guess what you will do and when and really try to make those things great for the enjoying people. But worlds made by machines can be really fun, because you know no one has put things there ahead of time and the chance surprises you see and find are surprises just for you! No other person enjoying the world will see them just the same way. They are different kinds of really fun.
In this way, enjoying a world made by people can be more like a good book or movie. Enjoying a world made by machines can be more like watching a team play a game against another team, or like people making up a funny act. It is exciting to know that no one has planned what will happen before it really happens!
Here again, the real world is more like a world made by machines than a world made by people. We do not know what is about to happen and what is supposed to happen, and that is really exciting. And, well, sometimes that is also really worrying.