Video Game Progress Is Magic

It's 1411. Spent the morning doing some cleaning, a noita run and sex. Also ate well.

I'm watching a long retrospective of Ultima VI. It goes somewhat into the history of PC's vs Mac's in the 1980's and the huge leap in graphics VGA represented.

It's interesting. You can look at progress as lines on a graph

but that line is an abstraction over countless smaller lines. Fractals of industries, sub-industries etc… Zooming in to even a single line in a single industry, it's amazing to realize how many people, how much human effort and ingenuity, go into even small innovations such as a single new game. Every inch is hard won.

It's also truly extraordinary in perspective. For most of our history progress was so slow as to be invisible. Generations would pass without any visible change in technology or social organization. Yet now we have 2% GDP growth per year. Furious creative destruction in every sector. In 11 years games go from Akalabeth (1979)

To Ultima VI (1990)

To Baldurs Gate 2(2000)

Sure games aren't the most representative example. Computers are one of the fastest advancing technologies of the last few decades. Games are a new medium and like all new mediums, there's rapid growth at first as the easy gains are snapped up. Still, we truly live in an age of wonders.