117: Pong

Image Text

Following this, the pong paddle went on a mission to destroy Atari headquarters and, due to a mixup, found himself inside the game The Matrix Reloaded. Boy, was THAT ever hard to explain to him.

Description

This comic largely references the 1999 movie The Matrix starring Canadian actor Keanu Reeves (yes, the same one from Sad Keanu) as Neo. The movie revolves around a hacker (Neo) discovering that the world he lives in is fake, and that he is nothing but a slave battery that is used to power a massive computer that generates the world around him. Upon discovery, Neo naturally rebels to this misuse of mankind, and trains himself to interact with the computers that run the world, until he is able to control and use them to his own advantage.

Pong is one of the earliest videogames in which two players (or one player and a computer player) play virtual tabletennis. A ball (the tiny block) is 'hit' by a paddle (the long block) and crosses over the screen, to be 'hit' again by the other paddle. Failure to return the ball results in a point won by the opponent. The speed of the ball increases as the ralley runs longer.

As the two (Atari, I suppose) programmers in frame 1 question: what if the AI-bot that normally only acts as a computer player learns enough to become sentient? The outcome is shown: the AI-bot takes controle of the code of Pong and stops and drops the ball to the “floor”. This also happens in the movie, where Neo through “seeing through the code” is able to stop (coded) bullets, and simply let them drop on the floor.

By the image text, we learn that after becoming sentient, the AI-paddle went on to destroy the headquarters of the producer of Pong (Atari) and then suddenly played a role in the 2003 successor of the movie The Matrix. Since this movie deals with the larger story around the virtual world and less around Neo, it is possible that AI-paddle had a hard time grasping that.

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Discussion

Rikthoff (talk) The issue date of the comic is definitely wrong, as the file doesn't have a create date. Can anyone fix?

Think I fixed it. I looked at the xkcd archive for the date. --DanB (talk) 15:41, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

Is the ball really dropping? It looked to me like the ball just started going down and will bounce off the side and go up, like it does in pong, only without any sideways momentum to move it back to the other player. Mulan15262 (talk) 17:02, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

So you're telling us you've never seen The Matrix. -Kazvorpal (talk) 03:19, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

Yes it is. Please watch The Matrix. Beanie (talk) 14:33, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

An editor just added a link to The Singularity, amongst a few other convoluted points... I just wish the coiners of that term had called it The Event Horizon, because that is what their analogy most closely resembles (the point at which it becomes an inexorable process). It's quite annoying for people to have just accepted the mistargetted/misnamed simile and think they're 'on trend' just because they use a (wrong) fancy word. 172.69.194.225 00:40, 5 January 2024 (UTC)