Yep, that’s another great question. Personally, I like the idea that art is any form of human expression that exists for its own sake. Not in order to be instructive or useful or to make money but simply because the person creating it felt like it (obviously this is an ideal and real life motivations vary).

More pragmatically, one might ask what art is good for, but since you didn’t, I’m not going to ramble here.

That said, there is the question I raised in my comment whether the work needs an audience, someone to behold it, in order to fully become art. I believe it does. If you paint a picture in the dark and hide it so nobody ever sees it, I struggle to accept it as art.

What’s your take on these questions?

In a good game they do, but those effects can be abstracted rather than simulated to save processing power.

This is the correct answer. It seems like matter and energy exist regardless of our attentions but the rest comes down to ontology. What is a thing? How does it come into being? How does it cease to be?

Next, ask yourself “do things need to be made of matter and/or energy to exist?” What about Mickey Mouse?

Then you move on to questions like “does a piece of art exist if nobody has ever witnessed it?”

And finally, the psychiatric ward. 😜

Thanks for the warning.

From memory, it felt like the electrostatic discharge that used to happen whenever I was touching my car. Annoying but harmless. The CRT part was speculation as I was reaching around blindly and don’t ultimately know which exposed contact shocked me.

Interestingly, the PC suffered no damage at all and didn’t blow its internal fuse, either.

Getting some strong the missile knows where it is vibes here. 😅

Live modding, huh? 😂 Takes me right back to my first PC, whose loudspeaker prevented me from covertly playing games when I was supposed to be sleeping. 😇

So I opened up the case and figured out that the PC speaker lead had a detachable connector. And the case was flexible enough that if I didn’t put all the the screws back in, I could just reach in and plug or unplug the speaker. 👌

Worked great, except for that one time I got shocked while blindly trying to finagle in the connector⚡🤯 (probably by the CRT assembly; this was one of those PCs that had everything incorporated in the case).

Thankfully, it must have been all volts and no amps so I was OK, even though I let out quite the yelp. 😁