Coding matters: Who imitates whom?

Photo of hands holding a gaming console. The game console is playing a driving game with a car on a road. The background is also a road.

I’m not a gamer. Unless you count Sudoku, Wordle and Tetris. Which I don’t, because then I have to admit how much time I spend gaming. But I’ve watched Renier play many first-person shooter games over the years.

Games imitating life

The amazing thing about these games is how realistic they’ve become. For a certain definition of realism, anyway. I hope people shooting at you in a bleak post-apocalyptic world is not your reality. Although that might be true for people in Ukraine.

I’m referring to the graphics – the smoothness and the 3D nature of the visual experience. I’m referring to the graphics – the smoothness and the 3D nature of the visual experience. I find myself leaning forward, just like the character, to look around a corner where an enemy may be lurking.

This is games imitating life.

Life imitating fiction

At the same time, we have life imitating fiction. Especially in the tech world. Sci-fi books and movies have inspired much of the technology we now take for granted.

Here are a few examples:

  • Mobile phones In 1966, the “Star Trek” TV show debuted a flip phone, aka the communicator.

    In 1966, Motorola created the StarTAC, the first mobile flip phone.

  • Drones

    Drones were popular in sci-fi books and movies long before they were available. Frank Herbert described a tiny assassin drone in his 1965 novel, “Dune”.

  • Wireless earbuds

    In the 1953 novel “Fahrenheit 451", Ray Bradbury imagined thimble radios tucked into people’s ears. He described Bluetooth-like headsets that produce “an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk”.

    Yup, that’s your wireless ear buds described there.

  • Video calls

    Video phones made their debut in movies as early as 1927. Now, of course, we take video calls for granted. Zoom, Teams, WhatsApp, Google Chat.

And there are dozens of examples where the tech world is still catching up to fiction. Our self-driving cars are not as sleek and intelligent as James Bond’s yet. Think of video on watches, 3D food printing and lots more.

(I found these examples at Micron.com. It’s a fascinating read.)

Life imitating games

But then it gets really weird. Recently I came across a video of a live military exercise. A new robot dog was being shown at the China-Cambodia Joint Military Exercise. It looks exactly like something out of one of Renier’s games.

So now we have life imitating games imitating life. Where will it end?

What do you think about this? Please share your comments.

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