What Video Games Have Taught Me

Wow, so my goal of starting a quality blog that gets updated often kinda went down the drain eh? That's ok though, when we fail at something it's best to get back up, re-evaluate your previous efforts, find out what went wrong, and then make sure it doesn't happen again.

Now I'm not exactly full of prophetic wisdom or eloquent wording, but I figure I don't really need to be. This is more of something I'm doing for myself, a place to publicly contain my thoughts and efforts to see if any improvement has been made compared to the last time I posted on the said subject.

Lately I've taken back to more of my nerdy roots and resurrected a few old projects I've been working on over the last few years. I mostly use wave.google.com to contain the technical aspects of my projects, but I'll keep a brief summary of progress and updates here as well. Of my electronic projects that I'm bringing back, I'm most excited about the home arcade. Growing up I played a lot of video games (big surprise), but It's not even the fact that I'll get to play the games that makes me excited. This project has taken a lot of planning, learning, and preparations to make it work. It's one of the biggest DIY projects I've done by myself (well a few friends helped with the labor). So with that I feel a great sense of accomplishment of seeing it come from a concept to fruition. I imagine that you feel the same way when you accomplish something that either you didn't know you could do, or seemed too far beyond your grasp. Now I don't mean to make some big spiritual comment or life changing realization based on something as trivial as an arcade machine, but I did learn a few things about myself when faced with a problem I don't know how to solve.

Early on when designing this arcade machine, I was most worried about how I was going to run all of the electronics. I had basic experience with soldering a few points and understanding very basic schematics, but this arcade would require at least 20 inputs not including directional keys. I remember getting the equivalent of last place in the science fair in like 5th grade (everybody either got a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd place ribbon...I got 3rd). If I were to compare what I knew in 5th grade about electronics to what I understood about electronics before I started this project, the only difference would have been my knowledge on how to use google now. So a few searches later and I started the long laborious effort I knew it take to not only design the style, look, and appeal of my machine, but more importantly the mechanics and electronics of how it'd work. This is about where I had my first realization. This size of the project scared me, so instead of working out the kinks I simply put it on the back burner for a long time, maybe if I ignored it long enough perhaps one day I'd walk down to my basement and see if finished sitting there waiting for me to beat whoever dared to challenge me in a game of NFL Blitz...not likely. I'd talk to people about it trying to build some enthusiasm, but eventually it got put on the bottom of my list and even forgotten about. It wasn't until a conversation with my boss about 6 months ago that brought it back to attention and I decided to just start working on it.

Realization #2: Once I actually started working on the project, the problems starting solving themselves and progress became faster. Over the past two semesters I've taken both macro- and micro-economics. At a quick glance I was curious as to why they didn't cover both subjects in the same class, after all they were both related to economics right? After taking both classes it was interesting to see how similar-yet-different they were, but more at how important each mechanic played a role in the system. Simplified, micro- is the study of things up close, the localization of a mechanic...not unlike an organ of the body. How it works, what it's purpose is. Macro- is the bigger, grander picture. Like the body as a whole and how all the organs work together to function. Turns out when working on my arcade machine I was focusing too much on the macro side of things. I saw the end result in my head and thought it'd take too much work, that it'd take forever to finish. Once I finally broke it down into smaller components (literally and figuritively) that I could work on in my spare time I soon ended up with a nostalgic and very playable arcade.

That's where this entry leads me today. While the arcade itself could be hooked up to pretty much any computer and configured to work, I never finished the front end (software) of my project and occasionally have glitches that can be irritating. The idea was to have a dedicated computer that when booted up contained all of the available games and to have them be chosen using the arcade console. As it stands at this moment you have to boot to windows, and using a keyboard and mouse, start the desired game. Perhaps I didn't learn my lesson. I thought too much at how much work it was going to be have it completely figured out, rationalizing that it was good as is. In essence I cheated myself. If I would have taken just a bit more time to solve the issues I was having the end product would be that much better, I also would have learned what happened as to prevent that problem from happening in the future, instead I fell back into my previous mindset of thinking too much, without getting much done. Realization #3: It's easy to fall back into our previous ways if we don't do anything to prevent it.

I've recently ordered the necessary parts and as soon as they arrive I'm going to install them and finish the project, partly to fix the problems it's having, but more to prove to myself that I can...and not only that I can fix the problem, but finish the project in of itself. If I can finish this project, then my sanity can remain while I work on the next project, getting better and better each time.