Computers: in this day and age we pretty much can’t live without them. Many of us spend all day staring at a monitor for work and then all night staring at a different monitor for leisure. We load them up with productivity suites and games and browsers and photos and god knows what else. And boy, do they ever drive us up the wall when they start running slowly, freezing or crashing.
You may or may not have wondered what’s it like being an operating system trying to manage all the nonsense we throw at our computers—but either way, here’s your chance to find out. You’re the OS is a game by developer Pier-Luc Brault, and it puts you in the metaphorical shoes of a simple operating system. As the OS, your job is to manage the various processes and inputs that are all competing for your attention, as well as managing your RAM and, ideally, preventing your user from launching you across the room in frustration.
Thankfully, as a modern computer, your hardware has multiple CPU cores to which you can assign processes, and the gameplay loop involves shuffling processes in and out of CPU allocation slots. Neglect a process for too long and its smiley face will devolve slowly into indifference, sadness and despair; continue to neglect it and your user will kill the process completely out of frustration. If this happens enough times, your user will ragequit and you’ll be in the doghouse; 10 ragequits and the user will simply give up and hit “reset,” at which point it’s game over.
No one would mistake this for “fun”—it’s like playing whack-a-mole at warp speed, and it just gets harder as complications begin to add up. You’ll encounter processes that sit idle while waiting for user input, wasting CPU cycles as they do so; priority processes that get very upset very quickly if they’re not shuffled straight to the front of the queue for CPU time; and processes that hoover up RAM like little mini-LLMs. Oh, did we mention RAM management? Yep, you’re on the hook for that too. If your RAM space fills up, you’ll need to swap pages to and from your computer’s hard drive, and you’d better believe that’s gonna slow things down.
After a few minutes playing You’re the OS, you might find yourself feeling awful about all the times you’ve sworn at your computer for running slowly even though you have the entire Adobe suite running alongside Word, Excel, Steam and a browser with a perfectly reasonable 200 tabs open. As a hypothetical example. Ahem.
