Video games are art. Fight me on it. The most exciting moment in reading this entire book came when I read about how Roberta and Ken Williams got the Apple II to play adventures games. Beauty itself. The start of a movement. Why’d everything fall downhill from there?
The Williamses, and the entire fledgling game industry, started as the hacker ethic personified in software. Here we got pure hobbyists, passionately grinding away hours to do things that no one had ever done with computers, squeezing every last bit of performance out of these machines. These people were real software hackers, not the exclusionists of MIT, sitting behind closed doors and pointing fingers at the “losers.” The game hackers were pushing towards personal goals, teaching each other the secret ways that make these pieces of art. Finally, we had an example of how computer programmers could be the kind of good (not just in skill, but socially impactfully good) that the hardware hackers were doing.
Unfortunately we never got a software Woz. Most of the stars of the industry turned sell outs. Ken Williams became particularly divergent, turning his company, Sierra Online, into a profiteering, copy-protecting machine (and a silicon valley casting of The Wolf of Wall Street). Individual game programmers could make a fortune off the royalties of a best-selling game. These single coders became like authors: individually seeking success in the form of money in the most uncooperative-unhacker display possible.
Computers are finally entering the homes of all Americans. Not only is there now an affordable mode of computing available in the form of many personal computing machines, but the software was being written so solidly that non-programmers can use them without worrying about corner cases or writing their own updates. Computers were finally becoming something for everyone, just the way the evangelical hackers wanted. Unfortunately, the convenience comes at a cost. Making computers more readily available to non-programmers meant that software has to be made available too, and so we have a demand for proprietary software grow into almost a necessity. Computers made their way to everyone, but they weren’t machines for hackers anymore. Historically open source would reach a low point as computers became more equipped for people who didn’t know anything about them: the sheep for the proprietary shepherds.
Every conversation any of us have ever had with someone who didn’t understand computers started because of this. I love computers, I think everyone’s lives could be improved by them and I think everyone deserve to have access to these wonderful machines. But reading about the change to hackerism and the video game age makes me wonders if my vision of a computer that everyone can access and have mastery of is even possible. It seems that more mainstream computers become, the less magical they are, the less potential they exercise.
The first game companies really suck the luster out of computing. All of them rose up from individual talent seated in front of their terminals to become browbeating trolls, forcing distributors to negotiate their way. Maybe Online, Sirius, and Broderbund aren’t entirely to blame, they were just a few companies with something to prove doing what any community of hackers do, just with more resources. And besides, Atari was doing worse for to them.
For the first time, the problem wasn’t copying code, it was re-implementing a program on a new machine. Software was dodging above hardware, and ideas had somehow transcended software. At this point companies stopped being interested in software and started caring about something else, the money, intellectual property, whatever, and hackerism stopped working. I hated reading these pages because they started to look like a reflection of the modern world, and every change seems to make it harder to be a hacker.
Decryptic 