Re:Ask HN: why nobody talks about game development any more?
by mechanical_fish on Saturday October 16, 2010 @11:25PM
(#1799544)
I'm not sure I accept the premise that games are relatively undiscussed here. There are many fields that are more obscure.
But perhaps part of the answer is sitting there in your question. Younger tech is more exciting tech, and though Hackers is an awesome book, it is also a historical document from thirty years ago, when personal gaming systems were in their infancy. Now it is thirty years later. Programmers have been exploring games for almost fifty years by now. (Spacewar will celebrate its fiftieth birthday in February 2012.) Computer games, as traditionally defined, are a relatively mature field.
By comparison, the web is a youngster, only in its teens. Social networking on the scale of Facebook is a handful of years old. The era of ubiquitous omnipresent wearable mobile networked computers -- we call them smartphones for the moment -- is less than five years old, even if it can be said to have truly arrived yet. These things are very exciting, because we have no idea how they will turn out, and because you can walk down the street and see opportunity everywhere. There are so many ground floors to get in on.
And, of course, many of the new opportunities will be games. But they may not all be called games, at least not at first. For example, my understanding is that game critics are having quite the existential crisis about Zynga's work. Farmville certainly looks like a game, and it is sold like a game, but it isn't like the games that have come before. Which brings me back to my first point: Game genres which are decades old may not get as much press, but people talk about Zynga on HN all the time. Because they are new and different.
But perhaps part of the answer is sitting there in your question. Younger tech is more exciting tech, and though Hackers is an awesome book, it is also a historical document from thirty years ago, when personal gaming systems were in their infancy. Now it is thirty years later. Programmers have been exploring games for almost fifty years by now. (Spacewar will celebrate its fiftieth birthday in February 2012.) Computer games, as traditionally defined, are a relatively mature field.
By comparison, the web is a youngster, only in its teens. Social networking on the scale of Facebook is a handful of years old. The era of ubiquitous omnipresent wearable mobile networked computers -- we call them smartphones for the moment -- is less than five years old, even if it can be said to have truly arrived yet. These things are very exciting, because we have no idea how they will turn out, and because you can walk down the street and see opportunity everywhere. There are so many ground floors to get in on.
And, of course, many of the new opportunities will be games. But they may not all be called games, at least not at first. For example, my understanding is that game critics are having quite the existential crisis about Zynga's work. Farmville certainly looks like a game, and it is sold like a game, but it isn't like the games that have come before. Which brings me back to my first point: Game genres which are decades old may not get as much press, but people talk about Zynga on HN all the time. Because they are new and different.