6 ms·
> Where can I send a kid to learn to play with software and not have it all break six months later, rendering the learning useless? If you had a Pentium 1 PC,
by zanny 7y ago
> Where can I send a kid to learn to play with software and not have it all break six months later, rendering the learning useless?
If you had a Pentium 1 PC, would you not still be able to run DOS and BASIC on it? Software "breaking" only happens if you let it - you can still use Windows 95, or XP, and run all those old programs that no longer work. If you have a copy of Flash 4 you can still run that on supported hardware, make media using it, and probably still have people with modern Flash installations be able to play it back?
The difference between the pinball machine and video game is not so wide a chasm. The vogue of pinball came and went, and now it is a small community hobby. Hobbies come and go - just look at the resurgence in Dungeons and Dragons the last 10 years adjacent to a huge decline in "AAA" PC game RPGs.
In the same light, while the Fortnite gamer might never be able to re-experience the event that just passed, there are thousands playing Doom maps written in the mid 90s today on engines refined through decades of hobbyist volunteer work to provide features not even often seen in modern titles. And simultaneously there are new Doom maps being made all the time, entire games (look up the Adventures of Square) made with its engine, etc. That technology is now over 25 years "obsolete" but lives on through its community.
You touch on it - but it really does matter if you own it. All these transient experiences being offered as a moment of engagement by corporations all of which are held under lock and key and never see a bidirectional creative process between maker and consumer are all vapid and empty. The digital experiences that endure are those that go both ways, and that everyone involved can lay claim to and participate in.
Modern video games are themeparks, but the tooling available through projects like GZDoom, OpenMW, Godot, etc are sandboxes for creativity that no corporation can take away. This is why the free software movement even began, and why it has only gained relevance as technology has permeated society and culture.
But that concept extends beyond just video games - Blender makes its open movies, there are repositories and communities around free music, art, etc. Communities built around shared worlds all licensed permissively to encourage participation and collaboration in opposition to the common proprietary reality of creative products being weaponized against their own fans through copyright to reject participation. You just have to look for them - they don't have the billions in advertising to permeate your every waking second of consumptive behavior.
- potta_coffee 7y agoYou brought up Doom, I'm still mapping for Quake. Quake and Doom are awesome because they are indeed sandboxes with open source code that you can play with at will. Also, these older games are quite a bit less complicated to make content for than some of the newer engines like UE4.
- xg15 7y ago> Software "breaking" only happens if you let it I don't think this is realistically true in the age of cloud services and forced, automatic updates. Maybe it is if you painstakingly stick to decades-old software or FOSS - but this will mean you're missing out on a lot of progress made in modern software. (edit:) > ...and probably still have people with modern Flash installations be able to play it back? Even if you got Flash running on your old PC, this is where things would break. Browsers deliberately increase the friction and technical expertise needed to enable Flash content, with the openly stated goal to drop Flash support completely in the mid-to-near future. Learning Flash might still be a fun experience if you can keep it on the PC it's produced - but if you want your kid to pass their movies on to anyone else, Flash is nowadays a dead-end. I agree though with the Doom thing. My suspicion is that in 20 years, many of today's games will be forgotten but people will likely still play FFIV on emulator - not because some artistic quality were better but simply because you can.
- Qwertystop 7y ago> My suspicion is that in 20 years, many of today's games will be forgotten but people will likely still play FFIV on emulator - not because some artistic quality were better but simply because you can. Inn 20 years, emulators will probably progress enough that the (non-server-based) games people still care about will be playable -- anything where there's no server, or the server is just a DRM check and all the gameplay happens clientside. Some of the servers will probably be replicable locally for single-player or small-group play, too; I think there's already reverse-engineered server emulation for some online-multiplayer DS games, some of it even having been made before the official servers went offline.
- EamonnMR 7y agoGodot, Doom, and Blender are all great but none have the level of approachability that Hypercard and Flash had for the amateur. They allow determined creators to soar, but they aren't enabling people who would not otherwise be creative to make interactive media in the same way. The 2d/3d gulf is a huge one to cross, and that may be the main issue. There was also something very wyswyg about both flash and hypercard-though Godot definitely approaches that. It's just hitting it's stride popularity-wise, so I guess where people take it remains to be seen.