I invested almost 20 minutes this morning trying to be a good os, but you understand what? People anticipate too much of their computers.
I strove to rotate processes through CPU slots, I was speedy to react to I/O requests, and I didn't even let memory pages get composed to disk. However the user-- some jerk that I'm guessing keeps 32 shopping tabs open throughout work-- kept rage-quitting as processes moved in attrition from brilliant green to red to "red with a frozen face emoji." It made me want to get four more cores or potentially simply eliminate a process out of spite. If they were an author, like me, I 'd kill the sandboxed tab with their blog editor open. Find out to focus, scribe!
You're the OS! is a web browser video game that combines stress, higher-level computer system design appreciation, and panic-clicking workout. Creator Pier-Luc Brault states particularly that the video game "has actually not been developed with education in mind," but it might present individuals to principles like procedure scheduling and memory switching--"as long as it is made clear that it is not a precise representation." Brault, a computer technology teacher himself, writes that they might utilize the game to teach about cores, RAM scarcities, and so forth.
What this looks like when you're really playing is pure triage, scanning and clicking and sacrificing processes you think can last just a bit longer while you handle other stuff. Do you click the I/O Events button and wait to see if it unlocks that red procedure in your CPU core, or immediately dump the locked procedure in favor of something else deserving? It's your job to answer this concern because, well, you're the OS.
As procedures become irretrievably secured, your user rage-quits them. After 10 rage-quits, they reboot the system. You're the system, you're the one they're rebooting. You saw what it was like to be an OS, and you stopped working at it. How do you feel now? Want to play again?
I made it 6 minutes 25 seconds on my first effort on Easy, and after that I understood I needed to switch from the dependable trackball I utilize for work to a real mouse. My 2nd attempt was 7:19, and my wrist was really mad at me. It's not the video game's fault totally-- I brought my pandemic-derived carpal tunnel problems to it-- however if you're not all set to click a lot, I suggest either playing in moderation or trying the video game in a mobile browser. It's actually a pretty enjoyable video game to have fun with your fingers on a mobile phone, particularly a tablet or a larger phone. I've saved a bookmark of this video game to my home screen for my next train trip.
One colleague at Ars will not be bookmarking this game. It is, they said, "a category of plate-spinning simulator I find kinda overwhelming. It's well done! Simply too much."
You're the OS (which I first saw via Clive Thompson) is an HTML5 game that's accredited under the GPL 3 and works on Itch.io. You can also run the game as a desktop app or build the web variation for modification, as detailed on the game's GitHub repository.