Linux.com

Having loved gaming ever since he was young enough to ride a bike with a banana seat, and having committed to Linux not too long after that, he liked visiting The Linux Game Tome to see what new games were out on Linux. So when its original author, Tessa Lau, stopped maintaining it, he felt its absence. Because he'd cultivated his skills in a programming community that shares the burden of innovation, he contacted her, and they worked together to transition the upkeep to Zimbinski.

Now he spends as much time on it as he can. "It varies greatly depending on how much free time I've got. I typically try to spend an hour or so per day looking for stuff that needs updating and searching for new games to add to the database." But his job, which he loves, can be demanding, and after one rough month where "I think I felt more stress from neglecting the site than I would have had I neglected the job instead" he called to the community for help. "A couple dozen folks responded. Now a few of them are actively contributing to the upkeep of the database, which is a nice relief. With the number of items in the Game Tome approaching 600, it's no longer so easy for one person to keep a handle on every one of them."

Upkeep includes not only combing the landscape for new games but keeping existing information up to date and accurate--which is why, though many contributors ignore it and send email instead, there's an "update" link. When all is going well the site pretty much runs itself; all Zimbinski has to do is monitor and approve changes. Considering there are "about 25,000 page requests from about 5,000 unique hosts from every continent, every day (except Antarctica,)" that says a lot about the paradigm's efficiency. Especially given that it's not Zimbinski's job, it's his hobby, which also says a lot about Zimbinski.

Anybody working on or running an Open Source project is generous, but this is a bit different. For a programmer whose preoccupation is programming, working on an Open Source project can be an indulgence, but for Zimbinski, to work on a site about gaming is not to indulge directly in his obsession for gaming; in fact, it eats up time that could be spent playing.

Born on the Chanute Air Force base (his father was a dentist there) in Rontoule, Ill., Zimbinski spent most of his youth in Duluth, Minn., where his parents had two more children and tried to raise Zimbinski Presbyterian. He learned to program when he was about eleven. His father's friend, who had joined them at the family cabin, brought an OSI Challenger (a PC that pre-dated the Apple II, had a 6502 processor, 4k of memory and built in BASIC interpreter). "He gave me a book full of short BASIC programs and left me alone. A couple of hours later, I was hooked." But while he never faked being sick to stay home and write code, he did make that excuse in order to game, specifically to play Ultima III on his family's Atari 800.

Zimbinski, like many subjects before him, protested my interest in writing about him, suggesting that his life wasn't all that notable. Besides the fact that telling me someone's life is not compelling is like telling a French chef that butter's just a condiment, it's clear to me that anybody engaged in the kind of fantasy gaming available today has an either inherent or cultivated capacity for wonder. I'm going to guess the former for Zimbinski because he hadn't been gaming that long when he explained to his parents why, even after completing Confirmation class [a religious training], he was going to opt out of Confirmation itself.

"They freaked initially, but I was able to clearly articulate my reasons for not wanting to do it. In a nutshell: God is too pat an answer for all the mysteries in the universe. Why not let there be unanswered questions and strive to discover the answers?"

But that doesn't mean he doesn't enjoy playing a god. With a nod to reservation because it's a Windows platform game, Zimbinski says his latest favorite is Black and White.

"You are the god of this world and you have a creature who does your bidding in this world. You train him like you would a real live animal by stroking him for praise or slapping him for punishment, teaching him how to feed himself and where to poop and how to treat the people who live in the villages in your world. It's very complex and the artificial intelligence is unlike anything that's really been seen in a video game before."

And as far as the mysteries of the universe go, it's the breadth of fabricated ones like Everquest which, unfortunately, is also not available yet on Linux, that really inspire him.

"It's a really wonderful example of the type of game where you log on and there are thousands of other people doing the same thing that you are. If you think about it too much it gets kind of," he pauses to chuckle, slightly giddy with appreciation, "I don't know, I've been really awed by this idea that we're all in this world and pretending that it's real and feeling real emotions about things that happen in it. It's really kind of cool."

Though Zimbinski's got Windows on his computer in order to play these games, he favors Linux in every other way and it's obvious why once he explains it. To him, Linux is like a game in itself.

"Originally I got Linux because it was new and different and closer to the systems that I was using at work [as a computer operator for Arthur Andersen] and connecting to over the Internet and it was really cool that I could have this mainframe-ish feeling operating system running on my little 486 in my basement. An operating system like Unix is so complex that you could never master all of it. You've always got a project to do if you want it. It's like the way people like to tinker with cars. You can do that on a Linux system forever. And the degree of control you have with a big operating system like that is unmatched by a commercial one like Windows, where every action that you can take has been planned out for you."

Stimulation is important to him. Boredom, to Zimbinski, is enemy number one. He was working in book stores while studying math at Augsburg College in Minneapolis when he decided he wanted to work with computers. Eventually he left school for that Arthur Andersen job and hasn't looked back at academia since naming his cat after the famous fractal set, Mandelbrot.

Though he is looking forward to ubiquitous cheap wireless networking, he doesn't think portability is going to have much of an impact on gaming.

"Hard core gamers tend to have a mountain of equipment to really get into playing a video game, if you're going to be obsessive about it, and you just can't take that with you. Some technology that allows the experience to become more immersive is probably the next big change for gaming. I don't know what that technology will be, although that [virtual reality] gear from the '80s didn't ever really seem to go anywhere.

"I don't know if I'm anticipating anything as much as it's really fun to be here right now and be able to watch, to be right on the edge of the curve, to be able to see and play with the new things right as they come out."

As far as his own future goes, he hopes, after maybe going into independent consulting and then retiring early, that "play" will eventually be the operative word in that sentiment.

About Bob Zimbinski

First computer: Radio Shack TRS-80

Favorite all time game: "Looking Glass' Thief and Thief 2 are probably the greatest games I've ever played on any platform. Loki's Linux port of Myth 2: Soulblighter is a game I still play at least weekly. It came out in mid-1999. If I was any good at it, I'd have beaten it by now, but I still really like it. :)"

Favorite Album: The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, Orb.

Just finished reading: A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance Portrait of an Age, by William Manchester.

Magazine subscriptions: Double Take, PC Gamer, Harper's, Linux Journal.

Stats of his home system: It's a 700mhz Pentium III system with the typical specs: 256m RAM, nVidia [that's the key component] GeForce 2 video card, big-ass hard drive, four-speaker sound card.

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