Programming and Fatherhood

When I was a boy, the closest thing we had to the world wide inter-web was The Rainbow, a monthly computer magazine for our TRS-80 Color Computer 3 (a.k.a the Co Co 3). The Rainbow published the printed code for a variety programs and applications, which you "downloaded" into your machine by typing them out, line by painstaking line. Hours (sometimes days) later, you'd finally run the program, hoping beyond hope that you hadn't made an error in the transfer from print to screen...and inevitably you had, and inevitably you'd spend hours (sometimes days) going back through it again, line by painstaking line, looking for the proverbial "needle of error" in the proverbial "haystack of code."

But at 14, I loved my Co Co 3.

Pardon the maudlin moment of nostalgia here, but I logged untold hours on this little 128K wonder (yes, that's a "K," as in kilobyte. That was it: 128 of 'em. And you had to save your programs using cassette tape. Those were the days). Some of those untold hours were spent entering code from the pages of The Rainbow Magazine, but more of them were spent working on code of my own.

I programmed exclusively in the Co Co 3's Extended Basic language, and, though I did develop a clunky-but-working word processor that I used to type up homework assignments, my primary interests were in the far less practical field of Game Development. I tried my hand at writing just about anything playable I could think of: text-based adventure games, first-person maze exploration games, shoot-em-up arcade-style games, Tolkien-inspired role playing games, weird versions of chess, flight simulators and battleship-type strategy games. And I learned first-hand about things like algorithms and symbolic logic and applied algebra, and Cartesian geometry and matrices and multi-dimensional arrays and animation and visual story telling and literary narrative devices and graphic design and systematic problem solving and who knows what else as I did so.

I even submitted one of my programs to The Rainbow. It was a game called "Karate," where two stickmen squared off in a joy-stick-controlled melee to the bitter death. The game was actually accepted and printed (I think they paid me $25.00 for it), and almost a full year later I got a letter from some 14-year-old boy somewhere who had typed it in, line by painstaking line, and was now wondering if I could help him figure out where the needle of error was in his haystack of code...

I was reminiscing about my Co Co 3 the other day because my son's been working lately with some game development software called Game-Maker that he downloaded from the internet . As I've watched him become impressively proficient with Game Maker's drag-and-drop interface, programming his own versions of pong, and dodge ball and shoot 'em up arcade style platform games, I've been thinking a lot about apples falling close to trees and chips off old blocks and stuff like that.

After my son had taught me the basics, I thought for old time's sake I'd try my hand at programming a game, which brings me at last to the point of today's post. Because part way into the project, I hit this wall where I wanted the little man to follow a path and slash at the bad guy with a sword, but it just wouldn't do it. I tried everything I could think of, but the little man just wouldn't follow the path.

And in a moment of desperation I called out to my son, who was playing Wii in the basement: "Son! I need you."

"What is it Dad?"

"I can't make the little man follow the path..."

"Be right there." He thumped confidently up the stairs. Looked for about 30 seconds at my code. Found the needle. A few clicks as he explained in patient tones what I'd done wrong, and suddenly the man followed the path as faithfully as a prize winning terrier graduating from obedience school.

And as he went back to the basement and his Wii, having helped his Dad in his moment of need, I thought back to that day when the issue of The Rainbow hit the shelves with my karate game in it, and my Dad took me down to the local Radio Shack and bought every issue in the store. And I thought about how he told the clerk as he paid that his son had a program published in that issue. I'd looked away shyly, but deep down inside I stood up a bit taller, because here was this man that I most admired in the whole world telling a stranger: my son has what it takes.

I wonder if this isn't one of the richest gifts a father can give his son: to call on him in a moment of need, to turn to him for help, to buy out the local Radio Shack when his accomplishment is on display, boasting on him to the clerk as he does so. Because when we, as men most admired by these boys who look up to us, assure them that they really do have what it takes, in these modest but potent ways, we invite them, too, to become men.