You’re the OS is a game that will make you feel for your poor, overworked system
Enlarge / If I click the "I/O Events" in the upper-left corner, maybe some of the frozen processes with a little hourglass will unfreeze. But how soon? Before the other deep-red processes die? I can't work under these conditions! (credit: Pier-Luc Brault)
I spent nearly 20 minutes this morning trying to be a good operating system, but you know what? People expect too much of their computers.
I worked hard to rotate processes through CPU slots, I was speedy to respond to I/O requests, and I didn't even let memory pages get written to disk. But the user-some jerk that I'm guessing keeps 32 shopping tabs open during work-kept rage-quitting as processes slid in attrition from bright green to red to "red with a frozen face emoji." It made me want to get four more cores or potentially just kill a process out of spite. If they were a writer, like me, I'd kill the sandboxed tab with their blog editor open. Learn to focus, scribe!
You're the OS! is a browser game that combines stress, higher-level computer design appreciation, and panic-clicking exercise. Creator Pier-Luc Brault says specifically that the game "has not been created with education in mind," but it might introduce people to principles like process scheduling and memory swapping-"as long as it is made clear that it is not an exact depiction." Brault, a computer science teacher himself, writes that they may use the game to teach about cores, RAM shortages, and the like.