Who Wants to Write Computer Games?

I am a skeptical person, I like to think of skepticism as a side-effect of intelligence. I instinctively question any fact I am presented with, tackle it from as many directions as I can see, dissect it, prove it, disprove it and test it against as many states and conditions as possible.

If the fact holds true my brain stores the information and if the fact doesnt hold any value then it gets discarded into that useless pile information where I store the data on where to go should I ever wish to purchase a box of viagra pills to satisfy my woman and the how to make money online offer I allegedly have to pay £700 to descover the secret of, it's the repository of information in the back of my brain that has a little sign over the door reading "Shits to use When Absolutely Fact-Faced".

This innate disposition to question and analyse everything is a trait i've noticed in all of the more intellectually gifted people that I know, and it is, by definition, the absolute practice of cynicism.

I have always had a passing interest in marketting, and one aspect of life that has always facinated me is the grift: To promise somebody something for nothing and give them nothing for something, I think it interests me because technology has for the first time made something for nothing a genuine reality.

I was into comms before the internet, you can tell because I just used the word "comms" which went out of fashion with 28.8k modems, half of the young I.T. nerds today probably don't even know what a modem is let alone what the term "comms" embodies.

And back in those days, and I stress that The Statute of Limitations absolves me of all my crimes, but back in those heady days of the I.T. revolution, before the internet when the pioneers of the global communications movement were using BBS', Fidonet and Barnet, I was a cracker.

A cracker is a type of hacker who removes security protection on digital products, and I used to do that. I did it as part of a group known as Hellfire who at it's peak in the early 90's were responsible for 5/8th of the worlds piracy.

So I really do understand the concept of getting something for nothing. It's a form of stealing known as piracy.

We did it because we could. Because the challenge was there. Because we passed our time playing computer games but we wanted more stimulation, we had the intelligence, we had these amazing computers and we knew how to use them, because education failed us, because we understood the global communications revolution and the rest of the world didn't.

We did it for the same reason climbers ascend Mount Everest.

We did it because there was nothing else to do with our knowledge, because computers were the future and we were told to get good with them, because we had gotten good, and because the rest of the world hadn't caught up.

Today a friend came over to get her sons computer fixed, I don't often fix computers these days but i'll always help a friend out. Whilst over the son, lets call him Child B (Child A of course being myself) asked me how he could access facebook, youtube and other sites when at school.

I did what any self respecting hacker would do, I told him to google "proxy" and "proxy servers" and learn about them, I explained the very basics of what a proxy server was and how it could help him and mentioned that there were more advanced methods such as data tunnels - but that a proxy server is simple enough and should be more than adequate for the task he wanted to use it for.

The concept is simple, I offered Child B the means to learn how to do a simple hack - rather than demonstrating how to do the simple hack, I wanted him to find the information out for himself hoping that it would inspire him. In short, I offered him carrot based learning rewards.

I thought the reward of being able to go on any site whilst at school and being able to show his friends that he could do a basic hack would be a cool reward for putting in a little hard graft and genuinely learning a useful skill, ie: how to actually "learn" by finding information online, and maybe it might inspire some fascination in either technology, in learning, or atleast in subversive technology use (which is a useful skillset in itself).

The response I got fascinated me, Child B begged and pleaded to be shown rather than directed to Google, not in an annoying way at all - infact at points it was quite humerous, but i'd definitely reached my limit of pleading by the time his computer was ready to be taken away.

I don't think this is unique of Child B, I think the Google-world has brought about a fundamental shift in kids today as this is a trend i've noticed in other kids of similar age time and time again.

Kids today aren't climbing the digital mount everest anymore. Instead they're used to information being there at their fingertips, they want the right search result now and anything else is a hindrance. The challenge isn't enough, because there is no challenge in reading web articles - and nobody inspired them on how to figure stuff out for themselves. So for kids today it's the answer that counts.

Of course children have always been motivated by the reward, and adults have always subverted them by introducing challenges before those rewards, this is the way of things. But I wonder just how much the internet is subverting this ancient methodology. Is Google doing children harm by taking away the challenge?

Why aren't kids motivated "because its difficult" anymore? Why do kids no longer do things "because it's there"?

And that's when it finaly hit me. It's not Child B reflecting a paradigm shift in social trends. I was the one who is different to norm.

I was lucky to have been born at just the right time, when I was 6 the first home computers came out, and I was lucky enough to come from a family who could afford one. I started programming it by typing in code listings from magazines - a popular hobby back then - and that inspired me.

Nowadays such a notion is just daft, a magazine like that wouldn't last. There has to be a new motivation to bring kids into the high level I.T. skills.

Where I was very lucky to have been born at the right time to become an I.T. genius, I think I am of my time. Kids today don't learn about the complex stuff until they're much older because the complex stuff is now so much more complicated than it used to be.

6 year old kids don't program anymore. Many kids don't even realise what a computer program even is until they arrive at university on a computer science / game creating course.

Kids actually expect to be able to go to university at 18 and learn how to make a game and come out the other side with all the skills, when the people at the studios who's jobs they are competing for did this stuff for over a decade as a passion in every spare moment they got.

Somebody needs to explain to these kids that if you want to do this stuff, if you want to work in I.T. or you want to make computer games then it needs to be a PASSION. You need to do it because you love it. You do it because you look forward to doing it.

When you're driven by that level of passion and have been for some years then you will have developed some of the same kind of skills that the people doing this stuff now have got.

And OK so typing in program code from magazines is a dead past time, and maybe it's us oldies fault for not inspiring you, maybe it's because things got complicated and we dont know how to explain it to you...

...But you know what: I had nobody to ask. I had to figure it all out for myself.

And that, kids, is the biggest skill I ever learned.

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