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Re:You’re not writing code, you’re solving problems by wool_gather on Sunday March 29, 2020 @01:02PM (#22720561)
It's a good counterpoint; high-speed games like platformers and FPS are only really possible with a computer. Lots of other game types have analog analogs, though.

Pinball is certainly a precursor to video games; there's other low-impact games of manual dexterity like ring toss/bocce/..., darts/target shooting. Choose your own adventure books/pencil and paper role-playing/wargames obviously predate computer gaming -- the computer just runs a timer maybe and acts as the gamemaster.

People have been playing various forms of puzzle solitaire with cards for years; Bejewelled or whatever could be done with a custom deck. Minesweeper is not different in kind from the old logic game Mastermind. Even something like Tetris seems new, but I think is similar fundamentally to a tabletop game like Boggle: randomized input + a timer to find solutions -- the geometrical nature of Tetris is kinda just an implementation detail.

But I would venture that the number of problems that are only quantitatively different -- i.e., faster -- because of computers utterly dwarfs the number that are qualitatively different, or even impossible without them.

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