I had played some floppy disc educational games on our old computer which involved moving around, like Mickey’s ABCs where you go to a funfair by pressing letters on the keyboard, but the general use of the computer was conducted via a text terminal, which was still opaque and unappealing to me at that age, even if I had picked up reading pretty quickly.īut now, when you went on the computer, you moved things around on your “desktop,” and if you had Dogz, your virtual pet could run across it and dig holes in it too. The important thing about this shift is that my internal perception of using a computer became primarily spatial.
#Encarta encyclopedia mind maze series
It came with games pre-installed, rather than ones that had to be inserted via a floppy disc (or sometimes a series of them!)
#Encarta encyclopedia mind maze windows
It also had Windows 95 on it now, instead of just DOS.
We got a new computer shortly after settling in to the new house, one which could read CD-ROMS. It didn’t feel like I could wander much, or had anywhere interesting to go anymore, unless I stuck to walking along or riding my bike on the roads, and even then, demonstrates my intuition that some neighbors didn’t even like that.Īs this process began and progressed outside of my home, something similar happened inside.
But then, on the left, right, and finally directly behind our house in my “extra backyard” these areas were divided up and demarcated, sometimes by more physical barriers, but often just by implication, that I shouldn’t go into “someone else’s yard.” I wandered, climbed, got ticks, covered myself in dirt and grass stains, and ripped out the knees of every pair of leggings I owned. When I was 5 or 6, my family moved from a small, remote house (near neighbors were a farm and a guy who raised emus), to an apartment, and then to one of the first homes built in a new suburban development.Ī big loop of road and the first three or four homes were the only things which sketched out how the entire area would eventually be separated into lots and filled, the rest was essentially undifferentiated fields with occasional large piles of dirt left over from construction punctuating the horizon.
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