6 ms·

This is a bit tangential to the article, but the first paragraph stuck out to me. For a 12-year-old girl, playing games on an iPhone is pretty regular beha

by opso 12y ago

This is a bit tangential to the article, but the first paragraph stuck out to me. For a 12-year-old girl, playing games on an iPhone is pretty regular behavior. Almost all of my friends have game apps on their phones, and we’ll spend sleepovers playing side by side. Back in my day, I was playing video games all the time, hacking them with debug cheats and GameShark. This was universally called a waste of my time by every adult I met, I had to go to great lengths to convince people I should be allowed to do it, and it's what on-ramped me to a super lucrative (and I hope useful to society) career in tech. Yet here we've arrived at a state of affairs where most western children regularly spend inordinate amounts of time on walled-up instant-gratification video game platforms designed to vacuum money out of their parent's wallets, entirely detached from inspiring them to hack at things and go into technology. Somehow this state of affairs is perfectly normal and okay. Yeah, I'm a bit bitter about it.

hkmurakami 12y ago
I hear ya. But there's probably still something different that these kids will get out of their particular version of the experience. Maybe it'll be battling Minecraft plugins and building one on their own (after all, this is still the #1 game among children from what I understand). It might be developing an instinct for great UX and media execution (games like Candy Crush for instance). Only hindsight will tell, but I don't think it'll be entirely for naught.
lkbm 12y ago
It's still seen as a waste of time, I think. Just has finally been accepted as normal. And while you may have been firing up hex editors, that probably wasn't the norm. YOu are right, though, that the computer games of the nineties offered a lot more hackability than iPhone apps. ZZT was an introduction to OOP for many kids, Red Alert had rules.ini that defined the stats for each unit, and Duke3D had configuration files in C. Mods and "Total Conversions" were a things. That ecosystem isn't just unavailable in mobile games, but would probably be hated by many companies who want full control over their product. So two things we should do: write more moddable games, include defaults that don't assume we're all male (or white, for that matter.
- userbinator 12y ago
  The "hackability" (and decrease thereof) isn't something exclusive to games - just look at what happened to the UIs of popular programs like browers, for example. Everything is becoming hidden away and more difficult to configure. In contrast to the many menus and dialogs we had before that encouraged users to explore and customise, it seems that apps now are far more opaque to the point that many users don't even realise some things are options that can be changed. That ecosystem isn't just unavailable in mobile games, but would probably be hated by many companies who want full control over their product Perhaps it's a bit of a stretch, but I think the whole "war on general-purpose computing" has played some part in this too.
  - indians_pro 12y ago
    The latest versions of firefox are a painful reminder.
    - cbd1984 12y ago
      Then get the UI you want. That's possible in Firefox, as opposed to Chrome, for example.
      - indians_pro 12y ago
        Yes but why are they doing it in the first place? When the whole point of firefox is its customizability and 'non-proprietary' nature over chrome. I don't understand.
- zanny 12y ago
  I got into programming a decade ago with Quake 2 engine forks and Neverwinter Nights private servers. You would never have avenues into that kind of thing from the ios platform at all. It is very much like how anyone from the Windows GUI generation never touched a terminal so they do not even know what a program / file / etc really is to begin with.
  - 12y ago
enneff 12y ago
It's interesting. When I first started using computers it was to play games, and in those days the only way to play those games was to either type up the BASIC code by hand, or learn the incantations to load the programs from disk or tape. In either case, you needed to (rote) learn some technical skills to have a bit of fun. In retrospect, I see I was lucky enough to come into computing at exactly the right time. When I was young I was capable of understanding (practically) my entire computer system, because those systems were so simple. As the complexity increased, so did the depth of my understanding. Today, I understand most of what my computer does (the most important parts, at least). What a tough road it must be for a newcomer to cope with all this complexity, the very complexity I have literally spent my whole life learning.
- A_COMPUTER 12y ago
  When I was a kid, hacking was a means to an end. If I wanted to play a game on my Commodore 64 or an Apple ][, I had to learn some basic skills on the computer, not tap an icon. Before I had a disk drive, I typed BASIC programs into the C64 from Compute Gazette, and learned programming via osmosis. If I got stuck in a game, the world wide web and gamefaqs didn't exist yet, so I figured out how to hack the savegame file. I'm not a natural hacker. If I was a kid now, I'd just play games on an iPad and effectively learn nothing because there's no friction. This isn't a slam on the ipad or misplaced nostalgia, just a recognition that sometimes you are forced to learn things out of necessity, and if you're born into plenty, you never are forced to grow. On the other hand, for anybody who's a born tinkerer, the fact that iPads are locked down and super easy to use is irrelevant because you have a thousand other cheap hackable devices like Raspberry Pis or Arduino. For someone who's not a born tinkerer though, they may never pick up a hackable device, and will miss some opportunities for growth.
ChazDazzle 12y ago
This is a prevalent meme on Hacker News but it's nothing more than the tech version of Old Man Yells At Cloud.
- venomsnake 12y ago
  This old man seems to be unable to find the built in file explorer in iDevices with which to be able to find the savegame location and edit the number of coins he has. Enlighten me, youngster how is that accomplished without breaking the warranty of the device?
  - comex 12y ago
    Here you go: http://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer/ http://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer/ You need a PC for that, though. If you want to stay on the phone, or accomplish more powerful things, you need to jailbreak. This theoretically voids the warranty, but kids don't usually care about that; on the other hand, consider that many of them would be using dedicated game consoles (home or portable) for equivalent purposes back then, and those typically required buying (i.e. for a child, convincing one's parent to buy) a physical cheating device, whereas jailbreaks are free downloads.
  - lips 12y ago
    I think the prominent divide between console and casual gaming hides the fact that iDevices behave much more like the consoles of yore (Cart and early CD based systems), which were, to the vast majority of kids playing them, pure black boxes of tech. My tinkering began with Apple II/Mac/PC games.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - mercer 12y ago
    Perhaps the 'hacking' occurring nowadays is just different. A lot of young people I know play Minecraft, for example, and a large subset of them even get into complicated redstone logic circuits and whatnot, or modding. When I look at my childhood, the vast majority of my peers had consoles and didn't 'hack' them at all. It was mostly the few 'pc gamers' that got into this. I don't think it's so different nowadays.
zorked 12y ago
Oh, that kind of thing still exists. Took me all of two seconds to find it: http://www.androidgamehacks.net/forums/ http://www.androidgamehacks.net/forums/ And just like hacking with Game Genie was unusual back then, jailbreaking devices, hacking .apk files and hand-editing save games isn't for everybody either. But all of that definitely still exists, and is far more accessible than ever.
- smtddr 12y ago
  Not the same. The GameGenie/GameShark/ActionReplay scene was much more accessible than hacking .apk files and jailbreaking mobile devices. I was messing with those devices even before I decided on a CS major. And it was as simple as just having one stray thought "What happens if I change this number?" In contrast, you don't just decide "What happens if I open this apk file up and change such and such?" How many people even know that the apk files are just zip files to start with? Then you get into decompile the files or hex-editor or whatever... but none of that is accessible as just randomly entering a different number in the GameGenie interface that's presented to you immediately.
m_mueller 12y ago
There's hope though - Minecraft seems to be immensely popular with children, and for a good part because it's so hackable and moddable.
- code_duck 12y ago
  Definitely. Minecraft and modding it are so popular that I've had a hard time finding an up to date guide for adults who want to make Minecraft mods - Google searches on the topic are filled with pages of sites oriented towards helping teens learn Java.
tessierashpool 12y ago
plenty of games have tremendous educational value, and I'm sure every pro-gaming argument you ever thought of which didn't involve hacking still remains as valid as ever. tetris teaches geometry, word games teach vocabulary, strategy games teach strategy - I don't even understand how you got upvoted. you kind of just sound like the guy who hates his favorite band because they got popular. kids can get so much more attention from figuring out a hack today than ever before. when I figured out a hack as a kid, the best-case scenario would be that my nerdy friends were the only ones who noticed. but a decade ago, having the best CSS hack on MySpace was something everybody in school would know about. today, being able to hack your phone is one of the coolest things a kid could ever brag about. software is eating the world, so competence with computers is becoming indistinguishable from competence, period. the fact that iOS does not provide you with a shell account can't change that fundamental fact. this popular iOS game was co-developed by a five-year-old girl and her father: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sissy%27s_Magical_Ponycorn_Adventure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sissy%27s_Magical_Ponycorn_Adve... I think you need to let the kids walk on your lawn a little, dude.
- michaelbuddy 12y ago
  Tetris teaches geometry? Bit of a stretch there. It may use geometry but it's not teaching anything I ever learned in geometry. Wife loves Tetris and she can't geometry for nothin'
  - tessierashpool 12y ago
    "Even computer games that were not developed with the explicit intent to provide such training, such as Block Out and several versions of Tetris, have been found to contribute to enhancing spatial skills." http://web.jhu.edu/cty/STBguide.pdf http://web.jhu.edu/cty/STBguide.pdf
    - wutbrodo 12y ago
      I can see how he was confused by the conflation of "teaches geometry" and "improves spatial skills" (though I can of course see how you could say the former and mean the latter).
wutbrodo 12y ago
Those two things are pretty tightly related (though of course, that doesn't make it correct at all). It's a lot easier for people to vilify something that's relatively uncommon (gaming back then) vs something that's ubiquitous. People en masse are stupid and lazy, and being uncommon is an easy (albeit idiotic) heuristic for "not an excusable use of time".
PhasmaFelis 12y ago
The people like you grew up and had kids, and every parent wants their kid to have what they couldn't have.
michaelchisari 12y ago
Yeah, I'm a bit bitter about it. Why? You won.
- imron 12y ago
  Perhaps because he would like future generations to be able to win also, rather than having the game taken away.
imron 12y ago
I don't think it's quite as bad as you make out. Like you, playing video games from a young age was the entry point for me into computing, but (partly also due to every adult saying they were a waste of time) I didn't realise until much later (17-18) that I could take that interest and make it in to a fulfilling career. Despite the walled gardens, tools are still out there for people who want to make new or hack existing games, and people who want to do that will find a way. They will have a curiosity about how things work that won't be quelled until they figure it out, and the process of figuring it out will be half the fun plus a large chunk of the learning.
mcphage 12y ago
Check out the LittleBigPlanet series... it's got a modding system that would have blown your mind as a child. I'm an adult and a programer and it still blows my mind. It's not just an incredibly powerful modding system, but that's an intended part of the game—there are levels, and tutorials with real voice acting, teaching you how to use it; and an easy to use online system for sharing your levels, or viewing the levels other people have made.
albemuth 12y ago
I didn't get into programming until college, but I remember spending hours creating my own winamp skin as a teen.
nosuchthing 12y ago
There's a good number of youtube videos where young kids give tutorials on modding Minecraft. Not quiet as raw, but certainly a similar gateway.

by opso 12y ago

hkmurakami 12y ago

I hear ya. But there's probably still something different that these kids will get out of their particular version of the experience. Maybe it'll be battling Minecraft plugins and building one on their own (after all, this is still the #1 game among children from what I understand). It might be developing an instinct for great UX and media execution (games like Candy Crush for instance). Only hindsight will tell, but I don't think it'll be entirely for naught.

lkbm 12y ago

It's still seen as a waste of time, I think. Just has finally been accepted as normal. And while you may have been firing up hex editors, that probably wasn't the norm. YOu are right, though, that the computer games of the nineties offered a lot more hackability than iPhone apps. ZZT was an introduction to OOP for many kids, Red Alert had rules.ini that defined the stats for each unit, and Duke3D had configuration files in C. Mods and "Total Conversions" were a things. That ecosystem isn't just unavailable in mobile games, but would probably be hated by many companies who want full control over their product. So two things we should do: write more moddable games, include defaults that don't assume we're all male (or white, for that matter.

userbinator 12y ago
The "hackability" (and decrease thereof) isn't something exclusive to games - just look at what happened to the UIs of popular programs like browers, for example. Everything is becoming hidden away and more difficult to configure. In contrast to the many menus and dialogs we had before that encouraged users to explore and customise, it seems that apps now are far more opaque to the point that many users don't even realise some things are options that can be changed. That ecosystem isn't just unavailable in mobile games, but would probably be hated by many companies who want full control over their product Perhaps it's a bit of a stretch, but I think the whole "war on general-purpose computing" has played some part in this too.
- indians_pro 12y ago
  The latest versions of firefox are a painful reminder.
  - cbd1984 12y ago
    Then get the UI you want. That's possible in Firefox, as opposed to Chrome, for example.
    - indians_pro 12y ago
      Yes but why are they doing it in the first place? When the whole point of firefox is its customizability and 'non-proprietary' nature over chrome. I don't understand.
zanny 12y ago
I got into programming a decade ago with Quake 2 engine forks and Neverwinter Nights private servers. You would never have avenues into that kind of thing from the ios platform at all. It is very much like how anyone from the Windows GUI generation never touched a terminal so they do not even know what a program / file / etc really is to begin with.
- 12y ago

enneff 12y ago

It's interesting. When I first started using computers it was to play games, and in those days the only way to play those games was to either type up the BASIC code by hand, or learn the incantations to load the programs from disk or tape. In either case, you needed to (rote) learn some technical skills to have a bit of fun. In retrospect, I see I was lucky enough to come into computing at exactly the right time. When I was young I was capable of understanding (practically) my entire computer system, because those systems were so simple. As the complexity increased, so did the depth of my understanding. Today, I understand most of what my computer does (the most important parts, at least). What a tough road it must be for a newcomer to cope with all this complexity, the very complexity I have literally spent my whole life learning.

A_COMPUTER 12y ago
When I was a kid, hacking was a means to an end. If I wanted to play a game on my Commodore 64 or an Apple ][, I had to learn some basic skills on the computer, not tap an icon. Before I had a disk drive, I typed BASIC programs into the C64 from Compute Gazette, and learned programming via osmosis. If I got stuck in a game, the world wide web and gamefaqs didn't exist yet, so I figured out how to hack the savegame file. I'm not a natural hacker. If I was a kid now, I'd just play games on an iPad and effectively learn nothing because there's no friction. This isn't a slam on the ipad or misplaced nostalgia, just a recognition that sometimes you are forced to learn things out of necessity, and if you're born into plenty, you never are forced to grow. On the other hand, for anybody who's a born tinkerer, the fact that iPads are locked down and super easy to use is irrelevant because you have a thousand other cheap hackable devices like Raspberry Pis or Arduino. For someone who's not a born tinkerer though, they may never pick up a hackable device, and will miss some opportunities for growth.

ChazDazzle 12y ago

This is a prevalent meme on Hacker News but it's nothing more than the tech version of Old Man Yells At Cloud.

venomsnake 12y ago
This old man seems to be unable to find the built in file explorer in iDevices with which to be able to find the savegame location and edit the number of coins he has. Enlighten me, youngster how is that accomplished without breaking the warranty of the device?
- comex 12y ago
  Here you go: http://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer/ http://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer/ You need a PC for that, though. If you want to stay on the phone, or accomplish more powerful things, you need to jailbreak. This theoretically voids the warranty, but kids don't usually care about that; on the other hand, consider that many of them would be using dedicated game consoles (home or portable) for equivalent purposes back then, and those typically required buying (i.e. for a child, convincing one's parent to buy) a physical cheating device, whereas jailbreaks are free downloads.
- lips 12y ago
  I think the prominent divide between console and casual gaming hides the fact that iDevices behave much more like the consoles of yore (Cart and early CD based systems), which were, to the vast majority of kids playing them, pure black boxes of tech. My tinkering began with Apple II/Mac/PC games.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- mercer 12y ago
  Perhaps the 'hacking' occurring nowadays is just different. A lot of young people I know play Minecraft, for example, and a large subset of them even get into complicated redstone logic circuits and whatnot, or modding. When I look at my childhood, the vast majority of my peers had consoles and didn't 'hack' them at all. It was mostly the few 'pc gamers' that got into this. I don't think it's so different nowadays.

zorked 12y ago

Oh, that kind of thing still exists. Took me all of two seconds to find it: http://www.androidgamehacks.net/forums/ http://www.androidgamehacks.net/forums/ And just like hacking with Game Genie was unusual back then, jailbreaking devices, hacking .apk files and hand-editing save games isn't for everybody either. But all of that definitely still exists, and is far more accessible than ever.

smtddr 12y ago
Not the same. The GameGenie/GameShark/ActionReplay scene was much more accessible than hacking .apk files and jailbreaking mobile devices. I was messing with those devices even before I decided on a CS major. And it was as simple as just having one stray thought "What happens if I change this number?" In contrast, you don't just decide "What happens if I open this apk file up and change such and such?" How many people even know that the apk files are just zip files to start with? Then you get into decompile the files or hex-editor or whatever... but none of that is accessible as just randomly entering a different number in the GameGenie interface that's presented to you immediately.

m_mueller 12y ago

There's hope though - Minecraft seems to be immensely popular with children, and for a good part because it's so hackable and moddable.

code_duck 12y ago
Definitely. Minecraft and modding it are so popular that I've had a hard time finding an up to date guide for adults who want to make Minecraft mods - Google searches on the topic are filled with pages of sites oriented towards helping teens learn Java.

tessierashpool 12y ago

plenty of games have tremendous educational value, and I'm sure every pro-gaming argument you ever thought of which didn't involve hacking still remains as valid as ever. tetris teaches geometry, word games teach vocabulary, strategy games teach strategy - I don't even understand how you got upvoted. you kind of just sound like the guy who hates his favorite band because they got popular. kids can get so much more attention from figuring out a hack today than ever before. when I figured out a hack as a kid, the best-case scenario would be that my nerdy friends were the only ones who noticed. but a decade ago, having the best CSS hack on MySpace was something everybody in school would know about. today, being able to hack your phone is one of the coolest things a kid could ever brag about. software is eating the world, so competence with computers is becoming indistinguishable from competence, period. the fact that iOS does not provide you with a shell account can't change that fundamental fact. this popular iOS game was co-developed by a five-year-old girl and her father: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sissy%27s_Magical_Ponycorn_Adventure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sissy%27s_Magical_Ponycorn_Adve... I think you need to let the kids walk on your lawn a little, dude.

michaelbuddy 12y ago
Tetris teaches geometry? Bit of a stretch there. It may use geometry but it's not teaching anything I ever learned in geometry. Wife loves Tetris and she can't geometry for nothin'
- tessierashpool 12y ago
  "Even computer games that were not developed with the explicit intent to provide such training, such as Block Out and several versions of Tetris, have been found to contribute to enhancing spatial skills." http://web.jhu.edu/cty/STBguide.pdf http://web.jhu.edu/cty/STBguide.pdf
  - wutbrodo 12y ago
    I can see how he was confused by the conflation of "teaches geometry" and "improves spatial skills" (though I can of course see how you could say the former and mean the latter).

wutbrodo 12y ago

Those two things are pretty tightly related (though of course, that doesn't make it correct at all). It's a lot easier for people to vilify something that's relatively uncommon (gaming back then) vs something that's ubiquitous. People en masse are stupid and lazy, and being uncommon is an easy (albeit idiotic) heuristic for "not an excusable use of time".

PhasmaFelis 12y ago

The people like you grew up and had kids, and every parent wants their kid to have what they couldn't have.

michaelchisari 12y ago

Yeah, I'm a bit bitter about it. Why? You won.

imron 12y ago
Perhaps because he would like future generations to be able to win also, rather than having the game taken away.

imron 12y ago

I don't think it's quite as bad as you make out. Like you, playing video games from a young age was the entry point for me into computing, but (partly also due to every adult saying they were a waste of time) I didn't realise until much later (17-18) that I could take that interest and make it in to a fulfilling career. Despite the walled gardens, tools are still out there for people who want to make new or hack existing games, and people who want to do that will find a way. They will have a curiosity about how things work that won't be quelled until they figure it out, and the process of figuring it out will be half the fun plus a large chunk of the learning.

mcphage 12y ago

Check out the LittleBigPlanet series... it's got a modding system that would have blown your mind as a child. I'm an adult and a programer and it still blows my mind. It's not just an incredibly powerful modding system, but that's an intended part of the game—there are levels, and tutorials with real voice acting, teaching you how to use it; and an easy to use online system for sharing your levels, or viewing the levels other people have made.

albemuth 12y ago

I didn't get into programming until college, but I remember spending hours creating my own winamp skin as a teen.

nosuchthing 12y ago

There's a good number of youtube videos where young kids give tutorials on modding Minecraft. Not quiet as raw, but certainly a similar gateway.