John Hultberg, "Road Through the Labyrinth" (1979)
John Hultberg, Road Through the Labyrinth (1979)
Can a Game Be Literature?

Mark's Pages

March 30, 2010:

Attempting to micromanage, the monotone VP draws a technical diagram on the whiteboard.

"You have input data, a processing engine which is a black box from the perspective of the rest of the system, and output data generated from those input data by that processing engine. It's as simple as that."

Well, sure, but. He's just described a pocket calculator. Or a neural network. Or a game of Pong, a spreadsheet, a photo editor, a Web browser. Any Turing Machine.

In his smug way the monotone VP carries on believing he's enlightened the developers, who, in their differently smug way, continue viewing the monotone VP as a helpless horse's ass. No practical problems are elucidated. The company stumbles blindly to its inevitable conclusion.