A Rust update from 6th Dec 2018 announced that “electricity is here“, but this new invention was shockingly similar to a popular Garry’s Mod addon called Wiremod that had been around since 2007.
Wiremod had been used in some Gmod DarkRP servers to link laser detectors to alarms (to warn of base intruders), and was also commonly used for lighting (and to control doors and turrets, among more trivial applications). Before 2017, Garry said of it: “I shouldn’t admit this, but I’ve installed it, I’ve looked at it and went ‘forget it’ and uninstalled it.” I think it’s fair to say that Wiremod was not very user-friendly.
Despite Garry not sounding impressed, Facepunch obviously added the concept to Rust (and simplified it) over a decade after Wiremod’s release, not that it should be surprising for Facepunch to lift an interesting facet from one of their games and place it in another.
Even if the use of Wiremod demonstrated the popular potential for electronics in gaming long before Rust did, the makers of Wiremod themselves probably took the concept of electricity from people like Thomas Edison after his work on a novelty called the incandescent light bulb.
Edison himself was not the first person to see the light from electricity though, more or less having pinched the idea from others before him – like Ebenezer Kinnersley, who (in 1751) talked of “The Newly Discovered Electrical Fire“.
Although it was Benjamin Franklin that popularly gets charged for the groundwork on electricity after he deliberately flew a kite into a storm to provoke “electric fire“. It seems that nobody “invented” electricity, but (like sparks of inspiration) it merely exists around us.
I imagine that a ratio of people copy popular designs when they first tinker with electronics in Rust, but to see so many unique circuits clearly shows the constant modification at play to search for advantages and satisfying enrichments like blasting your neighbours with obnoxious music until they complain to the server admin.
Seeing the ingenuity of a young generation finding applications for the simplified electronics in Rust paints a bright picture for the future. If video games are heavily criticised for not being “good” for young people, then it’s worth pointing at the motivation it’s given to a large number of people to experiment with circuits, and to be able to do so in a place where they don’t risk getting zapped.
We’re all the beneficiaries of hundreds of years of electrical inventiveness. If you’ve ever “stolen” a circuit design from a YouTube video, then I say “more power to you!“