Killing me softly
I just pushed King of Kong onto my Neflix queue and I am strangely excited to see this movie. The world of competitive arcade gaming both horrifies and intrigues me. As a programmer the part that intrigues me the most is the concept of “kill screens”. Fundamentally a kill screen is a special type of bug in a video game. To qualify as a kill screen the bug has to meet a couple of qualifications. First, the bug has to manifest itself as a result of the player reaching an unexpected point in the game, exposing a serious bug (often an integer overflow). Second, the bug must prevent the player from continuing the game, either by crashing or hanging the machine or by making normal gameplay impossible.
What I find most fascinating about kill screens is that players are usually excited to run into these bugs, since you need to be an excellent player in order to last long enough to encounter a kill screen. For instance in Pac-Man you need to reach the 256th board in order to overflow the 8-bit counter, which is an incredible feat. Since most of those classic video games are designed to be infinitely repetitive, hitting a kill screen is essentially the only way you can “defeat” them.
Contrast a kill screen with the BSOD. Both are the result of programmer oversight and both prevent the user from continuing with the task at hand, but you will never see a person jump for joy when their computer bluescreens. The difference between these two types of bugs basically boils down to marketing. One is a validation of victory, the other is a punch in the nuts.
A glorious opportunity has revealed itself. We simply reclassify all serious bugs as “kill screens” and the user’s perspective is suddenly shifted. I plan on immediately applying this concept to my job. The next time your iPod crashes don’t put a call into AppleCare. Instead call your friends and brag: You just beat the iPod!
