Why games born

Honorable mention: Hunt the Wumpus. The point of the game is to get from the bottom of your screen to the top without hitting any asteroids represented by simple dashes. In the game, players navigate a maze and when they encounter another player, they could shoot them or negatively affect them in some other way, making Maze War also the first first-person-shooter ever made.

The first game to depict human-on-human violence goes to Gun Fight. Known as Western Gun in Japan, where it was created, the game featured two sprites facing off in a low-res Western setting.

Breakout has a much bigger importance than just video games. It was also the inspiration for many features in the Apple II computer. Of course, it also helped that it was mindlessly addicting. In fact, the creative team tried to name the game Dungeon but ran into copyright issues and reverted back to Zork.

To this day, it remains of a beloved classic of RPG fans worldwide. The game is simple—destroy all alien ships before they destroy you. Who knew that a small triangular ship navigating space debris would sell 70, cabinets and become a giant in the golden age of arcades. Supposedly, Asteroids became so popular in the U. Creating a new genre of game between space shooters and pong copycats, Pac-Man remains one of the most memorable arcade games ever made.

Pac-Man , is a test for AI capability some 37 years later. The year was such an explosion of arcade classics that picking one almost feels criminal, but no game would introduce such lasting characters as Donkey Kong.

The player's goal was to get Pitfall Harry through the jungle to discover the hidden treasures before time runs out. Of course there are obstacles along the way, like fire, snakes, rolling logs, and quicksand. Games like these are the reason you thought quicksand was going to be a much bigger real-life problem.

The first and most obvious being that it looked so different from everything else. It was also the first arcade games to run on Laserdisc technology, a forebear to the DVD. It was the first game ever imported from the Soviet Union to the U. Simply put, it is one of the most addicting games ever created.

Honorable Mention: Duck Hunt, Excitebike. There is no franchise bigger than Super Mario Bros. Mario and his brother Luigi traveled through the Mushroom Kingdom, killing as many turtles and goombas as possible and to save Princess Toadstool from Bowser's castle—except she was never in the castle until the final level. It's enough to make a plumber want to break through the ceiling in the first dungeon and just warp on over to the fourth level. Honorable mention: Gauntlet, Paperboy , Ice Climber.

One of the first real open-world games, The Legend of Zelda had players guide Link through an outdoor maze, traveling from dungeon to dungeon. He begins his quest with only a shield and a sword, but quickly starts picking up gear, including his trusty boomerang. Link's goal is to survive all nine of the underground dungeons and finally take down Gannon.

But if he were to examine his mental condition, he would realize that he is still subject to worry and anxiety.

He experiences the suffering that always goes with wealth and prestige. A man rich in fame is usually caused distress by that very fame; and the same goes for wealth and children. Whatever one happens to be attached to and finds satisfaction in is bound to be a cause of distress. So even good action, action in no way evil, sinful, unwholesome, does not by any means bring freedom from the unsatisfactory condition. Just as an evil man suffers the torment due to an evil-doer, so a good man too is bound to experience his own particular type of suffering.

A good man experiences the subtle inconspicuous type of suffering that comes whenever one clings to one's own goodness.

So when we examine it as a phenomenon of nature, we find that it is not only the evil man experiencing the fruits of his evil deeds who is whirling around in the cycle of compounding: the good man too, experiencing the fruits of his good deeds, is likewise involved in compounding.

Both of them are involved in compounding. There is no end to this process. It goes on and on incessantly. Thought is followed by action, and when the fruits of the action have been got, thinking follows once again. This is the wheel of Samsara, the cycle of wandering on. Samsara is simply this cycle of compounding. As soon as a person has managed to comprehend this process, he is bound to start taking an interest in the opposite condition.

He comes to realize that money, name and fame, and the like are of no help at all and that what is needed is something better than all these. He then starts looking around for something better and higher, some other way.

He continues his search until such time as he meets some spiritually advanced person, sits at his feet, and learns from him the Truth, the Dhamma. In this way he comes to know about that state which is the very opposite of all that he has so far had and been and done. He comes to know about Nirvana and the way to attain it. He arrives at the certitude that this is the goal that each and every man ought to attain.

He realizes: "This is why I was born! Anything other than this is involvement, entanglement, compounding. This alone is the putting out of the flame, coolness, stillness.

His interest in Nirvana prompts him to seek the means of attaining it, and he is convinced that the treading of this path to Nirvana is the purpose for which he was born. There is one more small question to think over in this connection: "Am I glad I was born?

Am I happy about it or not? Of course noone ever has any choice in the matter of birth. It never happens that a person is in a position to decide that he will be born. He simply is born. But no sooner is he born than he comes into contact with sense objects by way of eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind. He becomes engrossed in these objects, and finds satisfaction in them.

This means that he is glad of having been born and wishes to continue existing in order that he may continue experiencing these sense objects.

And when people speak of making a lot of merit in order to have sense objects again after death, at a better, more refined, higher level than at present, this indicates an even greater desire to be born for the sake of these pleasant things. The important point here is this: a person having been born, enjoys the forms, sounds, odours, tastes, tactile sensations, and mental images which his mind encounters.

As a result he grasps at them and clings to them with egoism and possessiveness. He has been born and he finds satisfaction and delight in having been born. He dreads death because death would mean no more of all these things. The essence of this is that no man is ever born of his own free will, as a result of some decision on his own part; birth just happens as a natural process characterising all living reproducing things. No sooner is a man born than a liking for this birth arises in him in the manner described.

In the completely natural situation, that is, among the lower animals, the desire for birth is very slight and does not pose the great problem it does for man. A man should question himself and verify two things: "I am glad I was born. If the real goal of life is freedom from rebirth, then he was born in order not to be reborn, and so ought never to have been born in the first place! Why should he be glad he was born and so given the opportunity to walk the path to Nirvana? If freedom from birth is such a good thing, why then is there birth in the first place?

These are some of the questions that constitute ignorance, or at least that arise out of ignorance. The average person doesn't delve so deeply into these questions.

Accepting his birth as an accomplished fact, he simply asks himself the immediate question 'What to do now? Believing he was born to accumulate wealth, he goes right on accumulating wealth.

Or if he believes he was born to eat, or to build up name and fame, then he works towards those ends. He feels that is enough. To get name and fame and be materially well off is all the average person wants. For him that is the ideal; and there are not a few people who take this sort of shallow view. But we are now in a position to consider this question rather more deeply. We have come to see that no amount of this kind of action or this kind of condition is by any means satisfactory.

There is still something dissatisfying about it. Something is lacking. No matter how successfully we may pursue these worldly ends we are always left dissatisfied.

We are forced to recognize that something more is needed, and in the end we find ourselves drawn to the Dhamma. We come to realize that we were born to study this highest and most precious piece of human knowledge and come to understand it, in order to attain Freedom, the highest and most precious thing accessible to a human being.

There is nothing higher than this. This is the summum bonum , the best thing attainable by a human being. Suppose we accept that we have been born, and that having been born we have a certain task to do, a task so important that to carry it through to completion ought to be man's highest aim. There can be no aim higher than this attainment of complete freedom from the misery of the unsatisfactory condition. And by following the Buddha's directions this complete freedom can be attained.

The Buddhist teaching came into the world in order to inform people about the highest thing attainable by human beings. All the other religions existing prior to Buddhism had had this same objective, to answer the question: "Why was I born? They had all been fully occupied with this same question: "What is that highest good for the sake of which man was born? Some of these religions considered sensual satisfaction to be the ultimate, the highest good.

Some considered the summum bonum to be the pure non-sensual bliss of the brahmaloka. Then there was a sect which maintained that man's purpose in life was to seek bliss in the knowledge that nothing at all exists! There even existed the view that the highest thing attainable by man is the death-like condition of complete unconsciousness in which there is no awareness of anything whatsoever!

These were the highest doctrines in existence at the time when the Buddha-to-be started his seeking. When he searched and studied in the various ashrams, the highest teaching he was able to find was this. Being sufficiently wise to see that this was by no means the summum bonum, he set about investigating on his own account. Thus he arrived at the perfect insight which puts a final end to the unsatisfactory condition, and as we say, he attained Nirvana. Even though people had been talking about Nirvana long before the time of the Buddha, the meaning of the word as used by him differs from the meanings it had for those sects.

Mere words connot be relied on; it is the meanings that count. When we say we were born in order to attain Nirvana, we mean Nirvana as that word was used by the Buddha. We don't mean the Nirvana of other sects, such as abundance of sensual pleasures, or the highest stage of mental concentration. When we say Nirvana is our goal, we must have in mind Nirvana as understood in the Buddha's teaching.

And in the Buddha's teaching Nirvana is generally to be taken as the opposite of the compounded condition. This is expressed in the Pali saying we have already quoted:. Sankhara parama dukkha.

Nirvana is simply freedom from sankharas, compounds. We must understand then that we were born in order to attain freedom from compounding. Some people may laugh at this statement that our objective in life is to attain "freedom from compounding". Compounding, this spinning on in the wheel of Samsara, is unsatisfactory. Freedom from compounding consists in having such a degree of insight that this vicious circle is cut through and got rid of completely.

When there is freedom from compounding, there is no more spinning on, no more wheel of Samsara. Have you ever bought a video game, played it for a week, and then never even touched it again? Becoming bored with video games can happen to every gamer, even when there seems to be no good reason. Why do video games get boring? A common tactic used by game developers is to recycle as many gameplay elements as they can throughout their game in order to speed up the production process. In and of itself there is nothing wrong with this strategy.

It actually makes a lot of sense if it means a couple of years can be shaved off of production time. The issue occurs when the gameplay is essentially copy and pasted with only a few minor variations thrown in, in an attempt to keep players interested. Needless to say, I became bored fairly quickly.

Just like movies with overused plot lines can be boring, the same is true of video games. In order to keep players interested, game designers need to maintain an element of surprise. Great game designers can put themselves in the position of the player so that they can steer things in a completely new direction just when the player thinks they have everything figured out.

Nonsense surprises can make players roll their eyes, but well-timed, plot-relevant surprises will go a long way in keeping a video game from becoming boring. What makes you feel better? Being handed a blue ribbon for participation, or earning a blue ribbon for working hard and breaking a sweat? Game designers must present their players with a worthy challenge in order to maintain their interest.