In 1999, Dennis Chao looked at Unix administrators talking about “killing” processes and decided the obvious interface was a shotgun.
Visit PSDoom at the University of New Mexico
His experiment, later known as PSDoom, modified the Linux port of Doom so running processes appeared as monsters. Wound a monster and its corresponding process could be reniced. Kill the monster and the process died.
This was not merely a joke screenshot.
Chao used the project to think seriously about whether abstract computer operations could be mapped into an environment people understand intuitively. The desktop metaphor had already turned files into documents and directories into folders. Why not turn a machine’s process table into a building full of demons?
Unix had done half the naming work already.
kill -9, but with ammunition
The proposal has a surprising amount of internal logic.
A crowded room can represent a heavily loaded machine. Important processes can be represented by tougher monsters. A novice administrator can be issued a weak weapon, while an experienced one gets something stronger. Multiple administrators could cooperate in multiplayer mode.
Chao even points out that drastic actions should require more effort than harmless ones. On a command line, ls and a catastrophically destructive command can be typed with roughly the same physical effort. In a game world, large actions can demand movement, time and risk.
Then reality demonstrates why metaphor-driven interfaces are dangerous.
One screenshot shows Chao being attacked by csh, process ID 18729. He explains that after taking the image, csh was hit by friendly fire—possibly from tcsh or xv—and his session abruptly ended.
That is excellent research documentation because the failure is the point.
The page dates itself October 17, 1999 and links to code plus a CHI 2001 paper and talk. Chao credits the University of New Mexico’s Adaptive Computation Group and thanks the group for providing an environment where playing Doom for two days could plausibly be called research.
PSDoom survives because it is more than nostalgia for a famous game. It captures a moment when Linux, released game source code and academic human-computer-interaction research could collide on a university homepage.
Today system dashboards offer colored graphs, sortable process tables and polished controls.
PSDoom offered a BFG.
There are arguments for both.