Maybe you see a plant you have to collect in game or a rock wall that looks different. What items have you caught out of the corner of your eye that you realized was just your brain so focused on looking for things in a game that you saw it IRL and made you double take?

  • I played Uplink: Hacker Elite awhile back. One part of the game was that the in-game hacking software you could download had to be managed. One piece of software could take up 4 continuous slots of your computer “memory,” and I don’t think you could move it after installation without buying a piece of software that allowed movement, but you could delete it. Another could take up 2 continuous slots, another 6. I thought this was just a cool inventory system. Manage the space we gave you carefully and all that.

    A decade later, in a computer science class, I learn that this is really part of how computers store stuff, including software, in memory. Aside from the fact that our modern computers do move stuff in memory without you having to buy something special to do it.

    Was really not expecting the cool inventory system to come back into my life or be anything but a cool made-up inventory system.