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Computer Games

 

Battle with an alien spacecraft. Win the World Cup for your country. Use your skill and cunning to find your way through ancient castles. Yes, this is the exciting world of computer games! It’s not all about violence: there’s a game to suit everyone, from problem-solving to sports, and more and more are appearing in shops, cafes and clubs. The most popular game last summer was World Cup 90, a realistic football contest for two players. You choose your international team and, using your skill and tactics, control your team to win the Cup. If football isn’t for you, you could join the Turtles, or test your driving skill in Hard Driving.

Few people know more about computer games than Jon Ritman, a well-known British programmer. He has written Match Day, a football program, Batman and Head Over Heels – both arcade adventures. So how does Jon write a computer game?

It takes a lot of careful and logical planning. At first he doesn’t know what the characters or story will be. ‘You think of the type of game you want to write and then find a story. It could be sports, an adventure, anything. Then you have to work out each section of the game very carefully. Computers are like children – you have to give them very careful instructions so they know what to do.’

Each instruction is very simple. It is the combination of instructions, in a very long list, that makes footballers score goals and spacecraft fly in computer games. This list of commands is what people refer to as a ‘program’. The computer understands it in the form of numbers, but there are different languages through which human words are translated into numbers for the computer. Sometimes the instructions tell the computer to show something on the screen. The screen has hundreds of little dots on it which are called pixels. Each pixel has a number so that the computer can recognize it. If you give the computer the number that means ‘red’ and the number of a dot it will make that dot red. Repeat instructions like this thousands and thousands of times, and you have a computer game. It’s as simple as that!

 

Answer the following questions:

1. What kinds of computer games are appearing more and more in shops, cafes and clubs?

2. Who knows everything about computer games?

3. How does Jon write a computer game?

4. What instructions do you have to give computers?

5. How does the computer understand the program?