why isn't this a doom 2 mod: a manifesto by the packbats
A downloadable manifesto
current estimates are that the computing industry will have doubled the number of transistors it can fit in its integrated circuits every two years for fifty years
this pattern created a habit of a question: what can we do now that we couldn't do before
this habit has created forty years of machines which the computing industry wants us to landfill - machines which are uninteresting to its money
but why should we discard them?
a professional person in 2022 who wanted to do scientific computing or computational linguistics or the like would learn python or ruby or matlab or other suchlike practical languages
pico-8 is very poorly suited to these purposes - it cannot do much or very quickly
...which is to say it is in the same ballpark as a 1990s graphing calculator
moore's law has scaled our expectations every two years, but a 1990s graphing calculator could carry you through most engineering computations
go boot up the mainframe (the desktop) (the laptop) when you need to do the full finite element analysis or whatever, but simple models tell you most of what you need to know
the most common request people make of the pico-8 dev is to make it bigger, more powerful, do more
moore's law scaled their expectations
the windows version of the indie platformer Celeste requires 1.1 GiB of hard disk space
about half of that is graphics, about half of that is music
it makes sense, but it scales our expectations
we read a pdf once that made our computer chug
a thousand words or so, four pages
the pdf was thirty megabytes
the docx was only eleven kilobytes - why did no-one notice the pdf was so big?
our computer doesn't really crash a lot - it's a nice machine, four gigabytes of ram and an integrated graphics card
it froze up yesterday trying to read a web page
the document it tried to read was only three hundred words that time
...but the author wanted a nice subtle ripple effect in the background and hammered the gpu to make it
why didn't they notice what they were asking of people's computers to create that?
why did we write this?
because our computer is good and the computing industry wants to put it in a landfill because they can't use it
and that leaks out all over the place (three hundred words and it crashed our machine)
the computing industry has built a community that does not know how to be gentle
and we want to bring that gentleness to the forefront
we are artists - we care about our expressions, our communications, our audiences
we are not here to create carbon dioxide and fill hard disk platters
our ancestors had to think about the lightfastness of their pigments and how well they'd last
please, let us think about the machines we build for and how much we ask
let us write our essays in plaintext or markdown or raw html - tell our stories so a teletype could convey them
(or a screenreader, or a braille display)
let us make bitsy explorations and twine gamebooks and low-poly 3d environments
walk our hardware demands as far back as we can, take a breath, and ask, "what should I take from people when they listen to me?"
let us embrace how much we can do with so little
we have never played or modded doom 2
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Interesting manifesto, though I'm confused as to why you bring Doom 2 into this. Doom 2 doesn't take much for it's requirements, though some mods do and some don't, so why bring Doom 2 modding in general into the title and at the end?
Especially considering the part on "Low-poly 3D environments" which depending on the old engine used could use about as much hardware power as Doom 2.
This said however, I do think mindfulness is a good idea for people making anything and optimization is important, it's also very taxing depending on the project which is a real sap for the spirit, but it's not a bad idea to start out low and small for people getting into games. I can't claim I do that as I bounce around with various programs advanced and old, but I can appreciate the experience of starting small and grow big on making things in the realm of gaming.
Historically? Someone we knew when we were writing this was a fan of Doom 2, and a conversation with them about Doom 2 and system requirements was a big part of what inspired the manifesto.
Artistically? It’s kind of clickbait, I think? “why are you using so much computer?” is a less attention-grabbing question, and I think it makes our argument feel less extreme than it is. We are, in fact, saying that the makers of Overwatch and Fortnite and Alan Wake 2 should stand up and explain to the general public why they were so arrogant as to reject using Doom 2 as their game engine. Even if that didn’t really come across in the rest of it.
Or more hardware power than XCOM: Enemy Unknown (the Firaxis one). With Doom 2 we’re pretty sure it’s not gonna be a slideshow on Harriet, our Dell Latitude E6410 with 4 GiB of RAM that we mentioned in this manifesto, but we’ve seen low-poly 3D games that were slideshows on it.
I dunno, I hope that answers your question. It’s honestly not just about mindfulness to us - it’s about the computing industry wanting to landfill our computer specifically - but I guess it is also about mindfulness.
Thank you very much for the reply, it was nicely thorough.