It always bothers me when people witness some seemingly “complex” or “advanced” behavior and casually throw out their willingness to understand (or at least conjecture) what’s going on. I’m not saying everyone should be interested in every bit of knowledge they come upon, it’s just that it seems to me that complex systems are often composed of incredibly basic, simple parts or concepts. Understanding that knowledge is modular wipes away a lot of the anxiety of learning (at least for me). No one is interested in everything, nor should they be, but stubborn unwillingness to learn because of a predisposition that one cannot even attempt to understand seems like a silly excuse.
I’m ranting about this, because of this interesting article I found on digg about Metroid level design for the original 8-bit NES. What really struck me was how simple the overall architecture was for implementing such a lengthy and complex a game as Metroid, using little memory. It turns out it’s not as complex as you might thing. The author in this article explains how each room sits on a grid within the NES cartridge’s memory, and that grid looks surprisingly like the overall Metroid level layout:
They go on to explain the how each graphic is stored and how the visual components of the game are put together at runtime. Lots of geekery, but the moral of the story is that the complexity of the game is an illusion. It’s all much simpler than it seems.
the set of colors reminds me of that special kind of skittles, wild-berry skittles, with the dark purple bag?
the color scheme of the different berries was EXACTLY the same as these.
I think we are evolutionarily engineered to abstract ‘unfamiliar’ mechanisms to conserve/optimize brain computation resources. It takes significantly longer brain circuits to fire off when trying to understand the unfamiliar territory. But once you are there, as you mentioned, things might be incredibly simple. But whats equally fascinating is abstraction mechanism works well most of the times.
“evolutionarily engineered”?
I know! I realized it only after hitting the submit.