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No. 842: If you die in the game, you don't die in real life

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If you die in the game, you don't die in real life

First | Previous | 2021-07-28 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/dinosaur/?comic=842

Strip by: manyhills

Title: Video Games Explained! with T. Rex
T. Rex: Today: the magic circle!
T. Rex: That's a special kind of space that video games are!
T. Rex: Playing a game, we enter a world set apart from reality, with new rules and a safe distance from our everyday lives. It's like Scotland!
T. Rex: Huizinga invented the idea in Homo Ludens (1938).
Utahraptor: Wait, 1938? How could he be writing about computer games in 1938?
T. Rex: I know, right? They weren't invented until AT LEAST a year later!
T. Rex: But then, you're talking to a guy who lived about 60 million years after you died out. So maybe start with the man in the mirror??

The author writes:

Originally T. Rex's idiosyncratic notion of the dawn of computer gaming was meant to refer to Nimrod's debut at the Festival of Britain in 1951, but on looking it up it turned out there was an even earlier Nim-playing 'computer' at the New York World's Fair in 1940, the Nimatron. No word on if there was ever a Nim-O-Mat.

I removed one of T. Rex's exclamation marks in post-production.