My Time Machine

I read a post in my friend Balan’s blog today. You can read it here… http://poothabalan.blogspot.com/2008/12/something-to-think.html. What I understand from his post is that we should not get satisfied that we don’t have the problems of our neighbors. We should prepare ourselves to avoid or handle the misfortune, if we have to face it tomorrow, and WE SHOULD HELP THEM if possible.

Every species in this world has a mechanism of adapting to a challenging environment by mutation. But this mutation happens very slowly (takes millions of years). When the challenge develops faster than the mutation process, that particular species becomes extinct. This is the point where humans differ from all other species in the world. We have the intelligence to change our challenging environment to our convenience. Without fire we couldn’t have survived the carnivorous predators. Without farming we couldn’t have supported the exploding population. Without clothing we couldn’t have survived heavy weather conditions.

Apart from all these things how we differ from other species is that we create cultures. We can organize things in a higher intellectual order (ants are also organized but it is in their gene, not in their brain). Simply saying, we help each other. Our parents help and support us even after we become parents. I don’t think any other species do that.

I’ll come to the core of what Balan says: There is a story, one person walks along a sea shore. He picks up and throws the shellfishes lying in the beach dying, into the sea. One man asks him, “There are thousand of shellfishes out there dying. You can’t save them all.”. Then this man replies, “I can’t save them all. It’s not going to make any difference in the whole population of these shellfishes. But for the one’s I’ve thrown inside, it makes a difference”. We can not help all the poor people, but if we help some, their life is not going to be the same again.

Everybody should include this into their life’s goals. Happy helping…

I’ve always loved playing games. I can live without seeing anyone and doing nothing but just play games for hours (even days). I’ve read a lot of debates about whether playing games is good for mind or not. One argument against playing games is that they don’t improve any mental abilities, but people with good mental abilities play games. I would partially agree to this. The thing I don’t agree about this argument is about not improving mental abilities. Actually games serve as a training ground to sharpen our strategic skills (I like Age Of Empires much, so this point came out. But other games sharpen other skills). It’s more like an expensive simulation researchers do before actually building something. We must agree that simulation is coming into almost all the industries. So what if I can simulate a 10 years of war in an hour? what if I can stimulate a life time of business development in a tycoon game? Well games give us ground to make mistakes quickly and safely to learn from them and apply them in reality.

But many people stop with just simulation. They never move to build anything in reality. Today morning I was going through a term called “Analysis Paralysis“. That is doing too much of analysis and doing nothing. Or spending more on analysis itself without making any real profit (I remember my college days when I spend hours to prepare the study plan before the exam and not studying anything). So I started thinking about implementing these strategies learned to real life (well imagine about a general who has triumphant in 100s of battles and has 1000s of years’ experience in war and managing cities). This is the point when I decided that I should do business and create empires. So what is the first step?

Well apart from the too much of involvement in playing games, I like computer programming also. Programming is not something I do for living. It is my passion, fun, life… etc. I remember the numerous C programs I’ve written to simulate the fancy curves I’ve studied in engineering studies. So I thought of combining these two passions together to create a new passion, game development. Game development is not new to me. I’ve created games from my school days. Some in C, some in VB some in Java, but I’ve not completed any. To get an idea of what I mean by not completing, I’ll give an example. In 12th standard (12th grade or High school), I’ve started creating a car race. In that game the car will not move, the background only will move. When I started the game the background moved, but it seemed like a plane flying. At that point that game was dropped. So like these I’ve created half baked games.

But I’m not a small boy anymore, I must create real games which others can enjoy and get trained in some skills (blah blah blah….etc… etc…). After a long day’s thinking and lot of scratching in the notepad with my ball point pen, I’ve arrived at a perfect plan to create a game. I don’t want to break the suspense by explaining about the game now itself. Most importantly, when its fully baked, it may be totally different from the whatsoever explanation I would have given now.

So keep up the suspense… I will release it soon…