WHAT DOES “DIGITAL” MEAN, ANYWAY?

There’s a short answer to that question. Digital means that something is controlled by a computer processor, like a chip or a whole computer. If you have a digital watch, then there’s a little computer chip in there controlling all of its different parts, like the numbers telling time and the light, the date and alarm.

That’s a correct answer, but it is not complete. The word “digital”—which comes from the word “digits” meaning numbers. When you take apart a computer program—the language that tells a computer what to do—to its very basics there are only two numbers: 1 and 0. Two numbers don’t sound like a lot, but you can arrange them in ways that can do wonderful things … like record music on a CD or an entire movie on a DVD. If you were to decode a CD or DVD or a video game, you would find long, long strings of ones and zeroes. They wouldn’t look like a movie or music to you, but they tell the microchips in your CD player or DVD player what to do. To the chips in the players, they sound like, “Hey, color this little piece of the screen blue! Color that part of the screen green! Play this music—here’s the code for it!”

So, when someone talks about a “digital world” or “digital pets,” you know that the “world” or “pets” or even the monsters are controlled by a computer.