Welcome to DEFRAG the game! Embark on a retro journey as you defrag a virtual hard drive

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Defrag the game offers varying difficulty levels based on the size of the drive chosen for defragmentation. Players can select from Easy (1KB), Normal (128KB), or Hard (1MB) to test their skills.

defrag the game

For anyone who’s curious about why this belongs in daily.dev, and what the game means - an etymology lesson no one asked for, so feel free to stop reading: At least as far as I understand, the name defrag here is alluding to the defragmentation process on storage devices. Basically if you create a file, it takes up a certain number of pages (same-sized blocks of storage). But then, if you delete the file, or if the file gets too big, and needs to get moved into a slot that has more space, that will leave a hole the size of that file in your RAM. Sure, you can fill that hole with another file, but it has to be smaller than the hole, and any extra space left might become too small for any more files, so you’re left with a bunch of holes in your storage that end up just being a waste of space. That’s where defragging comes in. Your CPU goes and rearranges all the blocks and tries to close up all the holes.
You can think of the game as a unique version of a computer in which the files can only be moved to adjacent pages. The files are represented by the white pieces, and the pages are represented by the blocks. We want to defrag the storage device in as little time as possible, and we can only run one pass. Therefore, the game only lets you run one pass through all the blocks and penalises you for taking too long (think of this as overall time), or making too many moves (think of this as CPU operations). It also penalises you heaviest if you can’t defrag it fully, because that was the whole purpose.
Obviously, in real life, you don’t have the “adjacent page” restriction, but it’s a very interesting mechanic, and gives it almost a Tetris-style feel.
So anyways, whoever wrote this, big congratulations! It’s now my nerdier version of Tetris and I will be seeing rising files in my sleep now.

Great, now I can go try to manually defrag my drives.

Couple of feedback
<ul>
<li>The main menu (where you select drives) should have a one liner blurb of what the game’s objectives are. For example “Try to make sure the blocks are all connected/in the same space”</li>
<li>Before the first game played in a browser, there should be a tutorial, probably in carousel form</li>
</ul>

I don’t understand a thing. How’s this supposed to be played ?