Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Feeding the Little People
In 1985, when I came to Activision as a producer, I inherited a great little product
called Little Computer People. It had already been published on the Commodore
64 and was in the process of being ported to other platforms when I made its ac-
quaintance. Designed by David Crane and Rich Gold and originally produced by
Sam Nelson, the game was a short-lived hit. It inspired other games and toys in time,
especially The Sims by Will Wright.
The Little Computer Person lived in a little pixilated house on your screen. He
was said to live in your computer all the time, but the software let you play with
him. He remembered your name. He would tap on the screen to see if you wanted
to play poker with him, although he sulked
when he lost. If you asked nicely, he would
play piano for you too. You could coax him
to feed his dog, but if you didn't supply him
with adequate food and water, he would
grow weak and take to his bed.
Of course, the sales and marketing folks
at Activision took the Little Person on the
road with them to demo at various conven-
tions like CES. But there was a problem. The
sales folks never remembered to feed him.
There they'd be on the show fl oor while this
little guy was getting sadder and sadder. In
fact, he often died on the road.
Our solution was to make a fake Little Computer Person who never got hungry
or thirsty for the sales folks. I still wonder whether that was the right thing to do.
Maybe they needed some character development.
The little dude would take to his bed.
Brown's observations are as relevant today as when he initially made
them. The term “central abstractions” seems to be roughly equivalent to
what I call the representation. The point, then, is that the object of the men-
tal model should not be what the computer is doing, but what is going
on in the representation: the context, objects, agents, and activities of the
virtual world. Users do not need to understand what a POSIX fi le link “is,”
nor how a journaled fi le system protects against disk-drive write errors.
