Oh, those Easter Eggs

I was going to write about this yesterday but decided to go chocolate instead.

Other than the taste ones, there are the Easter Eggs that have been placed in media such as movies, television shows, or software.  Here is a list of 99 of the best (according to the author)  If you check the URL, you’ll see the number 62 in there so maybe it was a list that grew.  Hey, maybe that’s an Easter Egg in itself.

I think my first practical experience was in the game Doom.  There was a secret level that you could access if only you were observant.  It adds just another level of fun to these things as Andy Forgrave alluded to in his comment to yesterday’s blog post about the chocolate type.

I do remember discussions about the ethics of these things at university and I tried to bring that ethics into my own classroom.  I thought I might be cool and insightful to the students talking about Easter Eggs in software.

Wrong.

It turns out that they thrived on stuff like this.  Discussion boards abound sharing the various things that are hidden in their favourite games.  After a while, I think they played the games just to take advantage of them.  In Computer Science, we did talk about the importance of clean code and getting the job done right.  But, there was something special about Easter Eggs and we did kind of allow them in our programming.  It just had to be clean and non-offensive.  Students would spend hours getting it to work just right.  If they only would put the same amount of energy into their regular work.

Easter Eggs have become synonymous with April 1 and April Fool’s Day.  This year, it’s a bit different in that Easter did land on April 1.  Week code and issues with software and breaches are an everyday event these days, it seems.  I thought that perhaps developers would back off this year.

Wrong again.

Google is big into it and there’s even a Wikipedia page devoted to their efforts.

As I noted in last night’s post, the big one this year was finding Waldo in Google Maps.  That did occupy a large portion of my Saturday night but I did get them all, including the secret level 6.

Bottom line?  Easter Eggs are here to stay.  Just don’t take media too seriously on April 1.