
Doom as a tool for system administration (1999) - TazeTSchnitzel
http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/
======
GuiA
The paper got accepted at CHI 2001, but never would make it today. It's a nice
summary of what made CHI so great in the past, and how tedious it has become.

(For the paper to make it into CHI 2015, it'd probably need a part where the
author surveys 50 people and asks them inane questions such as "on a scale
from 1 to 5, how likely are you to use the software for your sysadmin needs",
and then measures+plots mean time for each operation on the command line vs
Doom, and ends with a 3 year timeline of proposed enhancements for the
software that will require additional NSF funding)

~~~
rhema
A modern version would make it to alt.chi. People present alt.chi papers
(usually very though provoking) at the conference.

~~~
shalmanese
Yeah, alt.chi was a great idea. I often find alt.chi papers more interesting
than CHI papers.

------
knd775
I don't care about the side effects of this. This is going to replace every
part of my workflow that it possibly can ;)

 _edit_ Okay, guys. I'm not serious. It looks fun, but not practical. It's a
joke. You can stop downvoting now. Sigh...

~~~
yellowapple
Downvoted for not taking doom-top seriously.

------
TallGuyShort
Idea: pipe stdout and stderr through a text-to-speech program. Programs with
noisy logs would be running around screaming like lunatics.

~~~
andrewchoi
Somewhat related:

"The best ping story I've ever heard was told to me at a USENIX conference,
where a network administrator with an intermittent Ethernet had linked the
ping program to his vocoder program, in essence writing:

ping goodhost | sed -e 's/.*/ping/' | vocoder

He wired the vocoder's output into his office stereo and turned up the volume
as loud as he could stand. The computer sat there shouting "Ping, ping,
ping..." once a second, and he wandered through the building wiggling Ethernet
connectors until the sound stopped. And that's how he found the intermittent
failure."

[0] [http://www.askapache.com/hacking/ping-unix-darpa-
muuss.html](http://www.askapache.com/hacking/ping-unix-darpa-muuss.html)

~~~
INTPenis
The FreeBSD game collection had some tunes you could play on the PC speaker
around 2004-2005. So I once found myself playing the simpsons tune on the PC
speaker of a server (yes it had a pc speaker) on repeat, and going into the
server room to find the damn thing.

------
sasas
Reading the paper [1], you will find the following comment -

"It is unfortunate, especially in the light of recent schoolyard tragedies,
that first-person shooters are so popular. Even though studies on the effects
of violent media on youth are not conclusive [..], interface designers must
proceed with caution when adding potentially aggressive aspects to interfaces.
One must take into consideration the age of the expected user base and the
possible use of non-aggressive alternatives."

It's interesting to see personal antidotes which have been shown to be
incorrect to be permitted in papers.

Today if the paper was written the text could have been replaced with -

"..researchers found that the playing of such games actually had a very slight
calming effect on youths with attention deficit symptoms and helped to reduce
their aggressive and bullying behavior." [2]

(replace 'youths' with 'sysadmins')

[1]
[http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html](http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html)

[2]
[http://www.springer.com/about+springer/media/springer+select...](http://www.springer.com/about+springer/media/springer+select?SGWID=0-11001-6-1433942-0)

------
hayksaakian
> It is difficult to tell if your employees are doing real work or just
> goofing off when tools and games have the same GUI.

this is listed under the "problems" section. maybe it should be in the
"benefits" section :)

------
dlubarov
It's not 3D, but I wrote a little curses program to find and delete large
files -
[https://github.com/dlubarov/cleanup](https://github.com/dlubarov/cleanup)

~~~
cylon13
My favourite part of this is that actually deleting the file is a TODO item.

------
sleepydog
Processes should be differentiated by importance and resource consumption. For
instance, PID 1 should be rendered as the Cyber Demon, since killing PID 1
would end your game. Any parent processes of the current process should be
friendly, and processes consuming large resources should be special enemies
like pinky.

~~~
lotharbot
PID 1 should be rendered as Player 1 (as a
[http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Voodoo_doll](http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Voodoo_doll)
).

------
Rooster61
It would be fun to set off a forkbomb with a small sleep call in a system and
watch it cause pandemonium. Shoot a couple of the rabbits so that they start
infighting, and then watch the system slowly eat itself as legitimate
processes enter the fray :)

------
k__
Brilliant idea.

With the Unix file systems, that show about everything of a computer, it
should be possible to create a game, where the whole world is generated by
that informations :D

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
IIRC there was a graphical file manager on some systems like this, famously
featured in Jurassic Park ("This is a UNIX system! I know this!")

Also, not quite the same, but:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus:_The_Game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus:_The_Game)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Aha, I found it. The file manager in question was fsn:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn)

~~~
digi_owl
So pretty much a 3D tree map.

------
Cthulhu_
Reminds me of a program I played with way back when, which was effectively a
desktop replacement - instead of a flat desktop, it presented a 3d-rendered
office building of sorts, with web bookmarks and applications rendered as
pictures on the wall and things like that. I forgot what it's called though.
Still, I wonder if something like that was re-imagined today what it would
look like.

~~~
Maakuth
fsn[1] seen in Jurassic Park brings that kind of metaphor to the file system.
I don't think it's that practical, but it sure looked wonderful in the movie.
I guess we better stick to 2D interfaces as long as we don't have 3D controls
that equal mouse in their practicality. Maybe one day there'll be a nice
Oculus Rift enabled desktop :)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn)

~~~
Qwertious
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgtba_GpG-U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgtba_GpG-U)

Wayland is very flexible.

------
kappaloris
"In a cyberspace environment, the players are not omnipotent, so performing
large actions takes time and effort."

Well... try to glue these operations on a OOT rom and wait for people to
reverse bottle adventure your system.

[http://www.zeldaspeedruns.com/oot/ba/reverse-bottle-
adventur...](http://www.zeldaspeedruns.com/oot/ba/reverse-bottle-adventure)

~~~
xrstf
Linux systems should boot with "-norba -noww" as kernel arguments ;-)

------
HerrMonnezza
One of the issues with this user interface was that you were going to kill the
Doom process itself, eventually :-)

~~~
Rooster61
The solution to that problem is simple. Map the Doom process to doomguy. If
you die, the process ends! :) You could even add a bit of code that sends a
message to the head sysadmin so if a newbie keeps attacking a big nasty and
dying as a result, the sysadmin would know to step over and tell the newbie to
chill out.

This also raises an existential conundrum. If the sysadmin has god mode, what
happens if they shoot init with a BFG? Kidding of course, but it is fun to
imagine an invincible process stepping heroically through the ensuing wreckage
of a kernel panic :D

------
moron4hire
I remember when this first came out. I was just about to start college. There
was a sense at the time that anything related to Linux system administration
was black magic, doubly so for anything involving game programming. So this
was certainly only talked about in hushed whispers and euphemism.

~~~
lifelongUU
I was actually a grad student at unm with Dennis Chao. Guy was bright,
creative and knew how to tell a good joke. Interesting to see this still on
the inter-tubes.

------
TrainedMonkey
I think any real world environment in which this would be feasible would be
served better by other tools. This is because in order to render a process
that needs to be killed a system needs to know that it is a bad process. But
if you know how to simply identify bad processes you would just write a script
to kill it, which is widely done now.

What you are doing at best is converting textual information into visual one,
I can't really see a way to do that without drastically increasing complexity
of representation.

~~~
theon144
Are you seriously considering this as a potential system administration tool,
or am I just bad at detecting sarcasm?

~~~
GhotiFish
well the article is obviously facetious, but what makes it interesting is the
notion of more physical upfront analogies for controlling our computers. It
get's explored all the time in Hollywood, and we all collectively roll our
eyes, but maybe it's not the stupidest thing ever.

------
larrydag
I've thought about this before in context to Mechanical Turk. The theory is
that you could put a game UI on top with a Mechanical Turk project in the
background. Its much more fun to play the game interface then to do a
monotonous job.

If anyone is interested in this idea let me know. I'm not a game developer but
would enjoy working on this MT idea.

~~~
lsjroberts
Well there's the folding protein game which along those lines -
[http://fold.it/portal/](http://fold.it/portal/)

------
talles
This is what I call _gamification_.

~~~
eridal
_doomification_ ?

------
davidrusu
Hah, imagine a system where processes were placed in an arena and they battle
it out for cpu time. Programmers will not only have to build their
applications but also write an AI to protect itself, an IDE could be a
fortress where processes could be relatively safe.

~~~
digi_owl
Darwinian computing?

Or maybe Core War?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War)

------
_cipher_
Nice!

Proposal: I'd like to have an ssh multiplayer so I can kill the other players'
systemd's. :)

~~~
digi_owl
Would likely either spawn as a cyberdemon or that massive spiderbrain...

------
gsmethells
I remember when this first hit slashdot back in 1999. It's still a damn funny
analogy. 8)

~~~
coupdejarnac
I was going to say the same thing. Cue the jokes about bringing down a system
with a BFG. :)

------
chrisfarms
UNIX groups could be handled by KeyCards, with the nice weird additional
feature of User1 being able to let User2 into an area usually outside their
permissions.

But really... idqd ... now bring on pid 1!

------
kinkora
i use to be part of a research group (back in 2005/2006) and one the guys in
the lab had the exact same thing as his thesis/research. And he actually built
a working program which leveraged off the quake engine (i think it was quake).
If I recall, he was invited by Cisco to demo his research.

Lets see if I can find his research.

Update: found it!
[http://caia.swin.edu.au/urp/l3dge/](http://caia.swin.edu.au/urp/l3dge/)

------
ThomPete
I remember that when I was working at Icon Medialab back in the days.

------
sneeple
So I guess, whatever you do, don't use the BFG 9000.

