Reading the news lately, I thought of two things. One is that thousands of square miles of Ontario burn down in big fires every year. It's just that it happens in the north, where there's very little human population to speak of. The other was a video game.
If you were a kid who lived anywhere in Ontario (or a few places in upstate New York) over the last 4 decades or so, you probably spent some time at the Ontario Science Center. I visited the place a few times as a kid, and of course it was awesome because it was all about exhibits you were supposed to touch and play with to make them do stuff. That was cool.
What was even cooler is that even back in the 1970s and early 1980s, they had a couple of videogames there. One was a lunar lander vector graphics game that accurately gauged velocity and fuel consumption; the goal was to land on the moon at a speed the lunar lander could handle. We'd get so frustrated with that one that we'd point the lander horizontally, fire the rockets, and see who could build up the most speed when they hit the lunar mountain. But I did eventually get to a point where I could land it a few times. Not sure what we would have done about subsequent take-off given my fuel state, but anyway...
Then there was this other game, which was focused on stuff more local to Ontario. It was color raster/pixel graphics. You got a trackball and pointer, and an array of resources at hand: a couple water bombers, some backburn crews, some diggers. That sort of thing. The game started with one red square somewhere. That was a forest fire. Next thing you knew, there were some yellow squares around it. They'd go red very soon, and create other yellow squares. Some would even "jump" over a square or two. You can imagine how it went: yellow, red, then black when it was burnt out.
I must have played that game 40 times. I think I won twice, both times by nailing the fire with a water bomber right at the beginning. Landing on the moon was something I could eventually get right. But if I was even a little bit late hitting that first red square, Smokey the Bear and all his pals - including me - were well and truly hosed.
I wish southern California's fire fighters, and the area's people, the best of luck. I hope they do better than I did.
From personal experience, if a videogame is too easy, people dismiss it. So, there's going to be a natural tendency to make a game rather challenging.
I remember the OSS! Being a kid in Buffalo in the 70's a trip to Toronto was a pretty common getaway. I clearly remember the lunar lander but not the forest fire simulator. My last time there was in the early 90's, not quite as cool when you're an adult but still a day well spent.