Few things are as irritating as a hung process that must be killed manually. The task manager isn't something we want to use frequently, even though it's essential for unsticking certain conditions. However, Itch.io user drfreckles42 had an interesting idea: turning all process management into a game called You're the OS. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to take on the role of the operating system, monitor process states, authorize input-output events, and prevent the user from losing patience.
Windows has various ways to communicate that something is wrong with the computer, and one of the most frustrating is the infamous Not Responding in a window. An internal error, a memory leak, an intensive operation that clogged the processor, lack of general resources, a dying hard drive trying to swap… many reasons and a single result: an exasperated user trying to interrupt the process.
You're the OS: Can You Do a Better Job Than the Operating System?
Now, imagine for a moment that the roles are reversed. That's what the game the game You're the OS proposes, created by drfreckles42 on Itch.io. Basically, the player becomes the operating system, with the obligation to coordinate processes, processor cores, input/output events, and memory blocks.
The game explains that each process goes through six states. The ideal state is for the process to finish correctly, freeing resources. However, as the wait extends, processes fall to lower levels, and when they reach their limit, the user decides to end them in a pure rage quit.
As Robert Downey Jr. said in Tropic Thunder, the ultimate goal is to survive, moving processes and freeing I/O events for as long as possible. At higher difficulty levels, the operating system (that's you again) must move memory blocks to disk when RAM fills up.
They can't stay there too long, because processes don't have access to their memory if it's stored in swap. If your actions are too slow and you accumulate ten kill-process actions by the user, the game ends with a reboot. Good luck! You'll need it…
https://old.neoteo.com/procesador-de-papel-curiosidad/Official site: Click here
