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1. 

   caiuschen, 2 Apr 2004 @ 4:02pm

   
   

   Personally for me...

   For me, computer games lead me down the path into the techie world. You see, I spent a lot of time trying to get enough conventional memory (remember the 640k memory limit in DOS everyone?) to get X-Wing working. I actually looked through the DOS manual and stumbled onto QBASIC. This was fourth grade. And I eventually did get X-Wing working. I think for a few years after that, most of my computer knowledge was gained either 1) trying to make a game work 2) making it work better or 3) attempting to program my own game.

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2. 

   bbay, 2 Apr 2004 @ 9:15pm

   
   

   Re: Personally for me...

   Oh yeah, X-Wing was particularly nefarious because of it's desire for a large chunk of expanded memory (EMS) (not to be confused with extended memory (XMS)!). And the drivers for EMS took up too much space below 640k, so you had to do the hi-mem trick and so you have to get all your drivers loaded in the correct order because there are different sized chunks of hi-mem and you want all the little peices to fit in there and ARG! *throws manual across the room*
   
   90 percent of the time it was fun, the game-before-the-game, but the other 10 percent, bleh.
   
   (I was going to write something about how kids today don't get that experience, but it makes me sound like a fogey. And besides, kids who have the programmer bit will seek out today's equivalent experience.)
   
   

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3. 

   Bakaneko, 3 Apr 2004 @ 1:53pm

   
   

   Re: Personally for me...

   Heh, I'm a (computer) generation older than you.
   
   My fourth grade experiences in exposure to computing through videogaming were trying to program a skateboarding game like SK8 or Die in Garry Kitchen's Game Maker because I couldn't afford the actual thing, playing around with 6502 assembly to program the perfect "demo" screen to impress my friends, and using Disk Doctor to recover deleted blocks from a disk another friend gave me to see what game he'd had on the disk before.
   
   All that convinced me to go into a career in aerospace engineering. :P... Of course, 2 years into college and the aerospace collapse convinced me to go into Comp Sci and later focus on IT instead.
   
   As for today's kids... Mod development. The things they are doing for that quite frankly amaze me.
   

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4. 

   Anonymous Coward, 5 Apr 2004 @ 7:41am

   
   

   Re: Personally for me...

   Getting X-wing to work? Sadly, I remember games far before that, that were so difficult to configure. I *never* understood what kind of crazy systems these programmers had, that had so much free memory after the drivers were loaded. They must have slimmed all theirs down... it was crazy, loading and re-loading things to get the game to work. And what about having to actually *flip switches* to get a sound card to configure on a PC?
   
   none of that drove me to programming - away from it, if anything - but it did instill me with a sense of competence and confidence in dealing with computers that's served me well.
   
   Anyway - I'm more curious how the whole modding thing will effect future generations. Because that involves a LOT of artistic merit as well as technical ones... I could see myself doing something like that if I was a teenager nowadays...
   
   

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5. 

   Bastard Sammy, 5 Apr 2004 @ 7:57am

   
   

   No Subject Given

   I'm not knocking any of you guys, but I never even liked video games. Anything more sophisticated than Super Mario never really appealed to me. I became a programmer out of the desire to draw on people's screens.

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