AI Makes Computers Fun Again

01 / A machine you could get your hands into

Back in the early 1980s I had an Atari 800. A 6502 CPU, ANTIC, CTIA/GTIA, POKEY and a memory map. You could see the pieces. You could find out what they did. And you could make them do something else.

02 / Days to experiment. Weeks to make a game.

Within days I had animated character sets and custom sounds. Within weeks, a game: shoot balloons out of the air using sprites—player–missile graphics—with exploding people dropping onto bunkers.

The point is the distance between an idea and something happening on the screen. The art of the possible was at your fingertips.

03 / More layers between the idea and the machine

Then came abstractions, frameworks, and APIs where once you might simply have called a function. And, it must be admitted, a certain amount of dumbing down.

The article will explore that trade-off: how much machinery do you have to learn before you can try the thing you actually wanted to do?

04 / Then came AI

AI opens up the possibility of pursuing an idea, trying it, and combining domains in ways that would otherwise demand a detour through someone else’s framework.

Connect this to CraftSyntax: expertise supplies the ideas and the judgement; AI accelerates the work of getting them into an experiment you can examine.

05 / Inspiration can come from either direction

Look forward. Look backward. An old machine, a craft vocabulary, a game mechanic or a new tool can all become material for the next experiment.

We are suddenly confronted with the art of the possible in ways we haven’t been in decades. Computers are fun again.