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Can you delete files by shooting them?

No, that's these guys.

My problem with the others is that their approach seems to be "how can we make a game act like a file manager", where I'm looking at it more like "how can we make a file manager act like a game"?

Reminds me of Brutal File Manager

Yeah. 3D is great for games and visualisation. Why are they trying to shoehorn all this stuff which has no real-world analogue into a model of the world? How does a Gantt chart work in this crazy place? Is it like some set of blocks which represent tasks which when I throw up into the air twists around like a Transformer toy into a diagram representing a critical path analysis?

You're right, there are areas where 3D doesn't make much sense. But as a file manager I think it might work reasonably well. Picture something like this:

A file is a solid column. The shape of the base tells you what type of file it is - triangle for regular file, square for block/char device, hexagon for socket/fifo, etc. The height of the column (log 2) tells you the file size. The texture of the column tells you the detailed file type (MIME type?) - movie, text, html, whatever. The color tells you what permissions you have on that file. (If it's a symlink, it has all those properties but is transluscent.)

Files are in a rectangular room, representing a directory. One wall has a door to the parent directory, the opposite wall has doors to the subdirectories. A third wall has a map of the filesystem on it, with "You Are Here". The last wall has a button on it - hit that button, the wall drops down, and you see the hidden files and subdirectories. The texture of the walls and floor of the room represents the filesystem type - FAT, ext3, SMB, etc. The color of the room tells you what permissions you have on that directory.

You can switch "tools" like in an FPS - maybe a shotgun deletes a file. (See here for an example of this.) Normal WSAD movement, but if you alt-click on something, you 'teleport' to it. So you don't have to walk all the way across a huge directory to get to a subdirectory - if you can see it, you can jump to it.

I've been slowly working on something like this, but I have three kids and one on the way - no time. If anyone wants to implement it, feel free.

I have never programmed professionally. I've been playing around with c and some other languages for some years though. And I have been using gnu software for about as long. But it wasn't until this christmas that I really realized it's power. I've always been thinking that "sure, open source is a good thing, because then the others who know things can make changes".

But just before christmas I was playing a bit with the new transparency that xorg har brought us, and I was annoyed about the lack of functions in "transset". So I decided to take a look at its code. It turned out the program was very simple and within some hours, without any previous knowladge of Xlib and X-programming, I managed to change its behavoiur the way I wanted. (http://forchheimer.se/transset-df/)

Then I suddenly understood that you don't have to be a super guru who understands all the systems sourcecode to gain from open source. One day there will be some little thing that is bothering you that you actually CAN do something about.

...the admins suck at virtual croquet? Then we'd have users that can't be kicked; anarchy would rule!

Actually, I kind of like the idea of admining a system with a video game :)

The BFM is written in Java. I think it actually uses this library, and it's nice to have it available and open.