Most of the world today use Microsoft Windows as their computer’s operating system (OS). Google Android is the most popular operating system for mobile devices. The operating system is the software that organizes and controls everything your computer or mobile device does. But do they have to be so boring?
I propose “Wizards OS,” an operating system that makes your computer run like a game that looks similar to Activision Blizzard’s Diablo. To do anything on the OS, you have to first create your character to represent yourself in the computer (like your user profile on Windows). When you log in, you start out at the town square, which is like your Windows desktop. In the town square, you have a chest for storing belongings (like the My Documents folder) and perhaps a little house that operates as a “desktop.” Every file on the system is represented by an item in the game. To delete a file (or item), simply chuck it to the floor. If something is laying on the floor for long enough, it eventually disappears.
There are a number of non-player characters (NPCs) in the game. NPCs are equivalent to software programs. There are wizards that guide you through processes, just like “wizards” in Windows (like a wizard for modifying your user profile… the wizard can cast a spell and give you administrative access, or change your password). There are warriors that go and execute programs. You give the warriors tasks and they’ll go do it (like, “Go open Microsoft Word”).
You can also travel outside of the town square area. Traveling in Wizards OS is like going through the hierarchy of folders. The further you travel, the deeper into the directory structure you go. Each folder is a location. So you can create a folder called “Projects” and place it to the northeast of town. If you create an additional folder called “My First Novel” inside the “Projects” folder, then you will go to it by leaving town, traveling to “Projects,” then continuing your journey past “Projects” into “My First Novel.”
Once you have traveled to “My First Novel,” you can pull out your handy “document creator” tool and create a Word document (which appears as a scroll in the game). Then you can give the scroll to your warrior NPC and ask him (or her) to go open up Microsoft Word for you and show the contents of the scroll for you to edit. After you’re done, you can either leave and go do something else, or work with the scroll. To delete it, you just drop it on the floor (it’s like putting it in the Windows Recycle Bin). Or you can hand it off to your warrior NPC to take it and deliver it to the “Archives” folder, that lies just out of town from “My First Novel” (if “Archives” is a folder inside “My First Novel”). You can even ask a wizard NPC in town to transform the .DOCX scroll into a .PDF scroll, then give it to the messenger warrior NPC to deliver it to “Printer,” which is a distant land outside the borders of your kingdom (your computer is your kingdom).
If you don’t care for medieval-style fantasy games, you can change the Theme of your OS. Changing the theme will change the look and feel of your computer world, change the NPC mappings, and the item mappings. Perhaps you can switch to a science fiction theme where each folder is a planet, and software are represented as robots.
Let your imagination run wild. I came up with this idea back when I was a computer science student. But alas, I am no longer a serious programmer, so I will never implement this idea. Maybe Wizards OS can even be created as a Linux distro.
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