I am creating a board game (nothing commercial, just a fun project) about system processes, and memory requriements for each process is going to be a key element in gameplay. In a nutshell, the game will let players, playing as different processes and applications, place tiles of memory on the board, and you win once you have enough memory! Each player is able to fight others for memory through rolling a die. I know browsers like Firefox uses around 1 GiB (can confirm by checking system monitor, I’m using LibreWolf).
Notably, I’m not asking about the system requirements of these processes, but the memory usage that each needs. And yes, I know, this will vary depending on the version and hardware it is running on, but general guestimates will be fine for this silly board game.
Preferably in nice increments (e.g. 1 GiB, 256 MiB), since each tile will represent a certain amount of memory. I’m planning for each tile to represent 128 MiB of RAM, meaning you need eight tiles as a browser to win, but this could be lowered in the future depending on how the game plays.
Since I don’t want the game to take too long, I will probably ignore huge memory hogs like video editors (consuming 8+ GiB depending on the project) and LLMs (consuming ungodly amounts of RAM depending on the model).
These processes could be of any kind, but they should be recognisable for the average person though, and preferably no brand names (e.g. “browser” instead of “Firefox”)
I have a number of things running in the background after booting, so here’s some numbers for you:
In addition to that, there’s always a number of systems services, most of which use a negligible amount of memory, but here’s some I’m just picking out because I recognize what they do:
Of course, these are just a snapshot of the systems state, and can only really give you a very rough idea of how much memory something might use at one point in time.
If you want to make your board game more complicated (probably not, but I like the idea, so I’m just throwing it in here), you could use it as an opportunity to teach virtual memory, segmentation, paging and internal vs external fragmentation. Maybe players get certain processes with memory requirements and have to fit them into their own main memory, and whoever can fit the most processes wins, or whoever cannot allocate memory for a new process looses. (I’m just writing down what’s coming out of my head, I don’t want to hijack your game idea, sorry.)