Here’s a story about how Xpilot set my daughters on the long and
treacherous path to being Linux hackers.
About two months ago my 12 year old daughter Linda, was getting
tired of SIM3000, CTP etc. and tried to start xpilot.
It didn’t work so I started the xpilot server. After playing for
a while she discovered that she could play against others on the
Internet. Very quickly she got my other daughter, 10 year old Jenny
playing. Since then xpilot has been the only game in town for my
daughters.
Now they spend long hours killing robots and enemies, making
friends and chatting with other xpilots all around the world.
A few weeks later I introduced them to BASH. Very soon they were
changing pilot-names, downloading maps and running their own xpilot
server. Simple shell commands like ls, pwd, passwd etc are now
being used with ease. This naturally led them into using other
computer programs like gnapster, kmp3 and gftp.
Their English language skills have also started to improve.
(We’re Swedish) This has been especially good for Jenny who
previously has shown little interest in learning English.
Its been amazing to watch how a simple game has effected my
childrens interest in computers. Xpilot has quite possibly changed
their future.
The downside of all this is that my telephone bill is
skyrocketing and my own computer time has been banished to the dark
hours of the night.
Many thanks to the xpilot team for making a great game.