Positive feedback loops (The power of choice, digital independence, and building something better for everyone)

I was invited to be a keynote speaker at GamedevDays in Graz, Austria. I’m honored to have been invited to such a beautiful community and space. All the talks were incredible. I learned so much in just one day. If you ever have a chance to go, I can’t recommend it enough.
All my experiences up to now with speaking in Europe are inspiring me to want to write about the scene here. I’m constantly blown away by how much more people know about art games, arthouse games, or experimental games.
Like Berlin had this incredible Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: THE SOUL STATION show. I’m seeing glimpses of this stuff being mainstream…almost…
It’s been beautiful!

Ok, so ramblings aside, following is my keynote turned into a blog post…

Years ago I started sharing small tools that I built for my games. I published them all as one-off standalone things.
They were usually presented as small silly digital toys, like a fake social media bar that would pour a constant stream of attention your way, simulating likes and hearts bursting out at whatever you did while using your computer, or a cute ASCII art drawing tool for if you wanted to quickly make some text art to decorate your posts with…
All this seemed like a cute idea. People generally enjoyed finding these bizarre things and then sharing them with friends.

I viewed these more like creating a “toy”. I always had this strong fascination with small non-game like digital objects, such as desktop pets, or prank software, because they all have this transformative quality to turning your digital world into something more unique. Something that adds a touch of color.
They break the heavily branded corporate monotony that seems to hover over our digital lives at all times. They remind us that these spaces belong to us too.
This, reclaiming a sense of personal expression in our digital world, is an important theme for today.

For example, when you exist on macOS the presences of Apple is always there. This is the same for Windows. Any personalization is very controlled.
I find it so fascinating that the presence of one silly little software thing, that runs purposelessly on your screen, can take back so much autonomy when people start collecting them.

When you go out and build or run these silly small things, they serve the purpose of customizing your space into something else. Something playful, goofy, a little enclave where you digitally live. Computers are our homes. We live there just as much as we do in the real world.
Older computer culture was really good at acknowledging this. For example, when customization was more of a thing like with Winamp skins, or sharing silly prank software was at the height of its popularity.
Teenage me would spend hours figuring out how to change the word “Start” on the Start Menu to “Fart”, or how to change the bootup screen to some silly Simpsons joke. It was common to find others online theming their machines like that.
There was always a need to take charge of your digital space. To make it something more. Something for you.
It doesn’t even take much to empower people to do this. Just give them something small and silly and it can turn into some precious little digital relic that they found and keep.

As I explored the theme of building and releasing silly cute purposefully useless software, I saw how important it was to people.

I eventually started this website where I had a collection of software themed around potatoes. It was called potatoware, with each program featuring a potato that takes up a large portion of screen-space, and it was always intentionally useless.
One of them, named “The Electric Love Potato“, was a desktop companion that would give you a constant stream of positive reinforcement. It was a continuous chatty presence in the corner of your screen, that occasionally serenaded you with really bad songs and potato recipes.
It literally does nothing useful. It goes against any good software practices. It’s completely unusable. Running it is bad usability. It is a constant disruption on your screen… Yet people really appreciated this distraction.
Its popularity was enough for me to make a second version where you could water your potato, comb, or discipline your potato for whatever reason. Sometimes your potato would feel threatened by other files on your machine and you would have to protect it.
Seeing how people appreciated these toys, I went on to making other desktop pets… like a little ghost that would haunt your screen and hide behind windows.

It is fascinating to me how people like collecting these. I was told that people would make a folder and treat those folders like they are a “home” to these silly digital creatures, including decorating the folder with little offerings to them (like image files).

I went on to explore this theme further by making a game that took place on your actual desktop, inside of folders, called “A Desktop Love Story“.
There were two folders, each with a file living inside them. One file, “the shy file”, was in love with “the cute file”, but couldn’t profess that love. Only you as a system administrator could help them fall in love and finally meet.
So you spent time passing around notes (plain text documents and images) between these two files, which one file generated for the other. A simple script in the files would read what you put into their directory, generate a response, and state was managed that way.
Eventually the two files agreed to meet, and you have to put them into the same folder.
Note that if you did this too early they would freak out because they were not ready to meet. They had to be ready.
When they were ready, you finally placed them together and they’d fall in love, supposedly living happily ever after in that folder. Also note that if you separate them after that, they would cry about losing their love.
People often tell me that they still have that folder with the two together, and they imagine the two having a happy file life there.
This is just a little thing that uses the actual desktop, and desktop folders, as a space to tell a story. It completely changes your perception of what a desktop and files are.
Even something as simple as files on a computer have a life that we can apply a narrative to.

This highlights that transformative quality these unusual things have. Suddenly your desktop is not just some space for work, but it’s a world to exist in. Play is possible here.

This has always been part of computers. That urge to make something our own, to extend it, to customize it, to be weird in it… is a cornerstone to exiting on the web or on a desktop.
We have such a long history of spaces, tools, platforms, software, that allowed customization and even thrived because of it.
We remember GeoCities because of that.

Computers empower people to be creative and enable a fantasy reality. We can be whoever we want on the web. That anonymity isn’t only necessary for expressing ourselves, it empowers us to explore aspects of ourselves we might not be able to in other contexts.
If we understand this, this need for users to exist like this, we can build in a positive direction that continues to keep this dream alive.

As game designers we, more than anyone, understand the value of fantasy realities.

The way this translates to tools and platforms I think is inspiring. Not only that but “fantasy realities” are necessary for building better realities.

The fantasy console movement, for example, I think is as beautiful as it is profound for how it lets participants create actual games in this entirely made up context. Pico-8’s accessibility, and even disarming way that it exists, makes it so approachable the community surrounding it is naturally supportive and positive.
The fact that it’s a fantasy reality, brought into practical reality by inviting participation with both play and creation, gives people a space to exist in that’s egalitarian.
It’s hard to imagine that Pico-8, or Bitsy devs, would be as exploitative as the larger game industry or any other issues plaguing mainstream games, because of the context these tools exist in.
Pico-8 keeps this dream of creative participation, fantasy reality, anonymity… alive because I could start participating there anonymously, and explore making things for that space, without any bar for entry or even pressure to output work a certain way.

The stakes are low and creative autonomy is in my own hands.

When I started this journey that eventually led me into game design, I began as some high school kid dabbling with interactive art for the web because I was inspired by the net-art movement. I was enamored by the idea that I could bypass curation, galleries, and what seemed (at the time) an incredibly unattainable art world that would never let me be part of it because I didn’t have access to the types of things that would enable an artist to be seen.
With the web I could just publish my work, and people could see it. I could grow on my own, on my own terms, anonymously.
The internet put power into my own hands. It gave me that freedom.
I put out this collection of interactive poetry pieces called BlueSuburbia. It was an online world of animated poems, and spaces that a visitor could explore. I was studying animation at the time, so BlueSuburbia was like existing in a giant animation that you could click through to trigger or explore its tangents.
The bar for entry was very low. Flash made it easy to make something richly animated, with lots of sounds, music, programming… I didn’t need to know any engines or game design. I could grow on my own terms, learning to code as I needed it.
I think this is still a beautiful thing about computer culture, and the internet, this sort of complex output is made simple because of tool makers that made it accessible to someone like me.
Now I can make tools too, and I “give back” by doing so.
We are all participants in this type of positive upward spiral.

BlueSuburbia grew to having a cult following. It was a lot for a highschooler. I enjoyed following people’s reaction to the work, and speculation about who made it. I was fairly anonymous at the time. Nobody knew that it was just some high school kid making this. My friends didn’t know, my teachers didn’t know… I worked on it during break in the library, or after school. I didn’t really share my secret art project with anyone.
People online loved it. It would constantly get shared in impressive sounding places, and got put on some curriculum for interactive art. Nobody knew it was me.
I would get people sending me their resumes. When they found out it was just some kid doing this they would stop talking to me…
I make it a point to share all this because I don’t think I would have found this creative path if it wasn’t for anonymity.
I couldn’t have done it without this low-stakes fantasy possibility space that was the early internet.

Here, I could make something without any obligation to anyone, and there was a healthy boundary between myself and the people that called themselves fans of it. I didn’t owe anyone anything just because they liked it.
Contrast this to today, where artists have to have a constant calculated presence on social media, and share a lot of time, energy, or aspects of themselves to promote their art. There’s really no sense of boundaries here. Having those would even be counterproductive to successfully existing on these platforms, or building a following.
Existing becomes a form of competition in context of the social media web. It’s a type of constant aggressive public performance, rather than a space for self-expression.
I draw this distinction because we, as developers and creators, still have the autonomy to do better. The internet is still a massive possibility space where we can invent better avenues of participation. We are not that powerless to the whims of corporations.

Links in this slide…
– Why Are YouTubers Quitting?
– Why Youtubers are Quitting in 2024
– Why Are So Many Influencers Quitting Youtube
– Reasons Why Youtubers Quit Youtube

I often think to what extent the game industry’s reliance on centralized algorithm based social media, like Twitter, actually caused harm in the way it encourages us to dunk on eachother, or drag eachother for ultimately irrelevant things often taken out of context. Social media rewards controversy and manufactured outrage.
It’s easy to get sucked into participating in the hamster wheel of takes because you want to be part of something, but to what extent?
Who do we alienate with that behavior?
Who have we alienated when we all jumped into a conversation that was rooted in dunking on someone?
It happened so often that it became normal… It’s hard to imagine any other context where it’s ok to treat peers like this.
It is a long standing rule that outrage feeds engagement, and I don’t think that dynamic will ever change because it’s so core to modern social media.

2024 marked a year of mass exodus of various popular to small Youtubers announcing that they are quitting Youtube. Various reasons have been sighted, most notably burnout and a change in how the monetization model works. One Youtuber explained that if you go inactive for even a short period of time they will turn off your monetization, and your channel will sink back into oblivion. Youtubers are kept in a constant hamster wheel race of outputting content, with the rules of the platform constantly changing in ways that often negatively impact their monetization. What gets to be viral or not is heavily based on chasing algorithms.
It’s fascinating to look at all this because, along with the hope of popularity comes the constant grind of maintaining all that, otherwise you will disappear.
This isn’t sustainable, nor is it healthy for people.
The word “Content Creation” entails creating content for a platform, often for free, and there are a few that rise to the top in a way that they can maybe both maintain that success and sustain themselves from it.

If you grew up on the early internet, and watched these platforms rise to popularity… Maybe you could have seen this coming. Either way, I’ll share a story…

At the beginning of YouTube the website had a very small yet positive community of artists making videos there. Me and my sister would post our work there. One of my animations was even featured on the front page. This happened a few times, and was back when they still curated. Humans curated. It was not algorithm based.
Despite being given this visibility boost, there was not a single negative comment to my video. It was rare to get anything outright mean.
With the rise of web celebrities, and celebrity video blogging, YouTube was featured in mainstream news on TV. The sensation that anyone could now be famous was irresistible.
My sister often points to that very moment that the dynamic on the site changed.
Our videos got flooded with negative angry comments, or sarcasm. The dynamic completely shifted. People expected to be entertained. This was now something for consumption, and people were entitled to it.
It wasn’t long until people found out that by causing flame-wars in their video comments that it helped give the video attention.
This sort of dynamic seems to have stuck with the way attention is directed, or harnessed, on modern social media. Outrage is good for views.
With this, I think it’s important to understand that social media is not the internet. It is a layer built on top of the internet. We are capable of building beyond that.

Older social spaces like GeoCities or MySpace offered plenty of room for positive self-expression, and customization. You could thrive there as an artist and have your work recognized. Plenty of musicians gained their popularity on MySpace. It was possible to grow a following without chasing the favor of algorithms or shifting monetization rules.
In modern context, we don’t have that type of self-expressive, customization, or level of freedom, and it seems crucial that we understand these dynamics because we (as developers, designers, and creators) are the ones with the power to do better.

Links in this slide…
– Why I still self host my servers (and what I’ve recently learned)
– nekoweb.org
– mmm.page
– neocities.org
– leaflet.pub
– www.exegesis.io
– zonelets.net
– Hotglue
– www.pillowfort.social
– www.wickeditor.com

I was lucky to have my roots in websites because I always understood the value of building my own online spaces, and hosting everything that mattered to me on my own sites.
Many online communities that I wanted to rely on, but didn’t because I hosted my own things, came and went. Each time I was grateful that I never decided to rely on any one service. I made effort to build my own, without any external dependencies.
It’s a know-how that I take for granted now, but it’s not commonly understood how easy it is to do all that.
There’s some great writing out there about self-hosting servers, or making your own websites… It goes to show how, at the heart of it, the internet is incredibly accessible to anyone that wants to go that route.
It’s easy to forget how simple all this still is.

There are a number of online spaces that exist offering both hosting and community, built around the ideals of the old web.
Like Nekoweb which allows for hosting static sites and has a community surrounding it. Neocities is a social network that boasts to bring back the lost individual creativity of the web.
Mmm.page is this incredible initiative, with a strong philosophy driving it, that supports easily creating pages with drag and drop. It’s beautiful to see all these individualistic sources of personal expression that pop up because of these tools.
No two pages look the same. They are part of this bigger community and you get the impression that the philosophies that made the old internet possible never really died. They exist. Alive and well. We just need to use them.

– There is an internet that is mine & I would like you to live in it with me
– Cool URLs Mean Something
– The internet is different now
– An interesting Tumbl conversation

When you start making tools, you start seeing all these other initiatives from developers doing the same, and the common theme is that they don’t get the attention they deserve, or need, in order to thrive.
This is why I keep saying that, as developers, artists, and designers, our participation needs to be a conscious decision.
In using alternatives we also empower alternatives.
In creating alternatives we empower others.

This is the heart of the internet. It’s positive participation, and that positive feedback loop that grows out of it.
When we contribute to this internet, existing in the digital world this specific way with alternatives, we contribute to a type of independence from monopolies and control.
Understanding the basics of self-hosting, website building, and DIY culture is digital freedom. This liberates us from the enshitification and exploitation we constantly deal with.

There’s a point to be made that when GeoCities was at its peak, and personal websites were very much the way people existed online, that space often got criticized for “bad web design”. Things moved too much. The colors were too bright. Every website was completely different. There was a pocked of people that didn’t like this, and pushed for more standardization.
Eventually the personal website went out of fashion, but it’s interesting that we remember this the way we do.
It was imperfect for its time, but idealized now… Even Myspace was heavily criticized for all those wild customized pages with animated gifs and weird navigation between places… But it’s now sorely missed.
I think this is an interesting push and pull, because these things, once criticized, are what people generally miss the most now.

Commercialization, and the standardization that follows when shifting focus to something being catered specifically to consumers, is a type of gentrification that even the internet was never immune to.

I think, when you consider these small examples of internet history, it is more meaningful to focus less on what the web used to be, and focus more on what we want it to be.

Inspired by this colorful past, as developers, we can create possibility spaces with our tools and communities.
We can invite people into this space, lowering the bar for entry, and keep alive this model of making creation accessible to anyone.

A few years back I started building this tool called the Electric Zine Maker.
It started as a cute little creative tangent to a larger project that I planned to bundle it together with.
Initially the Electric Zine Maker was just going to be a black and white drawing tool that outputted to an 8-page zine template, for quickly making and printing really simple little things. I had the know-how, so why not make a little hidden easter-egg zine making tool as part of my bigger game?
I love the idea of letting people make art inside of a game. Creativity is such a vulnerable thing. It makes the game much more personal to players because they are able to express themselves in it. It creates a connection between the player and your game. It’s why the intersection between tools and games is so interesting to me. The space that an art tool lets you inhabit can be playful too.
This is the tangent the Electric Zine Maker grew from.

Overnight I threw this little drawing app together. I asked on social media if people would be interested in using it, to gauge if it was even worth the effort of releasing it on its own. My friends all said “yes”.
I was pretty concerned that the lack of features would make it uninteresting so, to compensate for that, I made the UI as over the top as I could, hoping that this would make it an interesting experience for people.
I didn’t think it would be much, so I made sure that it also had a potato presence in it so I could shoehorn it into my potatoware software. It seemed like a good candidate for software that is useless, silly, or a practical joke.
Whatever the result, it would still fit in *somewhere*.

Most of this early build of the Electric Zine Maker was hacked together in a frenzy.

I love eccentric and colorful UI design, it makes things fun to exist in. The fact that it looks “so different” helps encourage people to be open minded when interacting with something. It invites you to leave your expectations at the door, and be willing to experience something radically new because it just looks so weird.
It encourages this level of open mindedness in players, especially when you need to encourage people to view what they are doing playfully, which is perfect for art-making.
I also added some weirder tools to the Electric Zine Maker, to accompany the simple black and white features, that I thought might help with throwing together unique looking zines.

I published whatever I had to itch.io and thought nothing more of it.

This early “Electric Zine Maker” took off overnight. The way it did really fascinates me.
It garnered a lot of interest, and I credit that to how different, weird, unusual, eccentric, loud, colorful, and so on… it looks.
The project turned into something of a “yes, and” (like in improv theater) between me and the community that used it.
I would see someone use the Electric Zine Maker in a unique or silly way, and then I would make sure that this style of creation was supported by it.
Like I noticed people using it to design games, so I incorporated templates that let you have branching options when paging through the final zine. Some of these templates were very weird, like the Tetraflexagon, which is based on a popular paper-math-toy.
In this template you can page indefinitely, always discovering new combinations of pages… It’s bizarre, but people ended up using it in very creative ways, so I made sure to support more of that.
I kept building the Electric Zine Maker to support sillier use-cases or features that I noticed people using it for.

The drawing tools that ended up being in the Electric Zine Maker are all very weird in terms of an art tool. You can draw with glitches, it has a “fluid dynamics” features where you can splash around in your art, you can paint with animated gifs that you import, or use it to generate actual ASCII art, or even paint with ASCII art… Lines will pulsate, grow, and change colors… All of these combinations allow you to make very different looking art.
In the end, that supposed “uselessness” ended up being very useful to people because it made things like glitch-art accessible to anyone.
People using the Electric Zine Maker often use it just for the art tools… not just to make zines. They’ll use the art tool to create game art because it’s so easy to make glitchy looking things in it.
The combination of tools makes certain aesthetics accessible to people who would otherwise not know how to do the same in Photoshop.
I think that alone is a really beautiful thing to see.

Each tool, or game engine, has its own aesthetic. Smaller more specific tools empower aesthetics that would otherwise require more technical know-how in the bigger style-agnostic engines. Pico-8 lets you discover your voice as a pixel artist, even if you don’t know how to make pixel art. You can explore your own pixel aesthetics there.
It’s harder to do that in something like Unity where you have to specifically know what you want to make before making it. These larger tools require a bigger technical hurdle, and plenty of practice, before you’re good enough to just confidently throw something good looking together.
It’s similar with the Electric Zine Maker. The fact that it is a fantasy, completely separated from more realistic art tools, lets people explore aesthetics that would require more work elsewhere.

I always thought it was sad that modern mainstream art tools spend so many resources on replicating real world art tools, like realistically drawing with water color, pencil lines that mimic drawing with actual pencil, or the way chalk looks… when digital art has this huge possibility space where we can re-invent what a line is.
I think this is a great metaphor for any other tool, engine, platform, community, or aesthetic. We can invent these new playful ways of being, or expressing ourselves, and empower people to participate in that.
It lowers the bar of entry for everyone. Because it’s so egalitarian it makes creation welcoming to people who might otherwise be put off by, or intimidated by, things that look too professional. It completely removes the need to be “good enough”.

It’s enough to just make something.

As game designers we understand the importance of building fantasy. Our digital worlds hold space for inhabiting fantasy in beautiful and creatively empowering ways. The intersection between tools and games is made possible through play.
Software is art too!
An art tool can be art just as much as its output.
Art is a type of play.
Creativity is play.
I think acknowledging this is inspiring because I built this fantasy world around the Electric Zine Maker too.

I made a silly website called “Mackerelmediafish.com” and it’s part of this entirely different tangent about a lost technology. The player has to visit this website, dig around in it, to find this missing deteriorating technology, eventually freeing it so it can live again.
The Electric Zine Maker makes references that it is built in “Mackerelmedia Fish“. Tying into this fictional world.
As a result, the Electric Zine Maker feels more like a relic of some alternative digital universe, than it does as realistic software.
By creating this fiction the tool exists in its own space. At this point it’s more than just a tool, it’s part of a story, and people are invited to participate in that story by making their art in a specific, wild, unusual way.
It encourages this playfulness as you create.

I find it very interesting that a common feedback for the Electric Zine Maker is that it helped people break out of a writers block, or get out of a creative rut.
When I showcased the Electric Zine Maker, it was always fascinating to observe the types of people that use it. You will get this person approaching the table, clearly interested, but too shy to use it.
They’ll say that they “don’t have any ideas”, are “not good at drawing”, or “aren’t creative” themselves… They’ll start casually pocking around in it. As they discover these silly tools they’ll be smearing lines, glitching, enjoying the animated bubbling brush-strokes… What ended up being a very casual “sure I’ll try it”, turns into half an hour or more of them making an actual zine.
The fact that it’s such a “toy” helps it be a tool to people. They invent uses for the very weird art tools. They end up making something even though they had no intention to do so.
This speaks to the power of play in creativity. When you make a tool, you clearly see how connected playfulness is to art.

“Different” can break us out of a creative rut. It’s beautiful to be given spaces where you are encouraged to “play”. We get so used to viewing software, the internet, websites… a certain way, with certain restrictions and traditions, that we forget all this can be wildly different.
There’s a difference between usability and tradition.
Usability is not a one-size-fits all model, and it should not be viewed as a death sentence for creative, different, wild, loud, or colorful work.
Conversations surrounding usability, accessibility, and who this alienates always bothered me because I don’t think it means that work can’t be interesting anymore if you care about usability.
It’s a design language like any other, and it can be explored to empower other forms of usability too, that does not alienate people who enjoy or want different things. It also does not need to prevent experiences from being eccentric.
Standards and good usability are not the same thing. Approaching it like it is a design language, where you get to see how it fits into your project, you can define your own way to make your work accessible.
It’s about listening to your user base, and seeing how you can empower them to exist in your software that certain way.

When we view usability as this very rigid and restrictive thing, the conversations often turn into the same arguments that criticized GeoCities, or experimental websites.
Software is art too!
It’s about giving people access to being able to enjoy that.

People often criticize my work for being so different, but I think that’s missing the point.
I didn’t have it in me to make another Photoshop, or something similarly traditionally accessible for a number of reasons…
The biggest ones being that I could never compete with Photoshop, or properly cater to the needs of the type of community that would use something traditional.
Standards come with their own set of expectations, and that can be difficult if you have limited resources.
It’s A LOT of work, resources, time, energy, and often stress, to make something “normal” because the bar for expectations for that already exists. It’s set by people much more advantaged than me, who have the resources to cater to exactly that. “Normal” entails higher expectations based on the professional bar of quality that exists.
The way your tool is designed is also what creates the type of community your tool ultimately attracts. If you create something professional looking, you will have to take care of professional needs, which is a lot more work for someone like me.
I have no comfortable means to invest enough work, or time, required to make something “standard” that lives up to these expectations.
I believe that it’s important to find your own voice. Everyone brings something unique and meaningful to the table. This is true for software too. Lack of resources can ultimately be your greatest strength because it forces you to really explore something different. There’s space here to make something beautiful, meaningful, and unique.
In this case, I decided that there are enough professional tools out there. There are not enough unique tools that treat how they exist as a type of personal expression in itself.

Our digital world needs this silliness too, just as much as it needs productivity oriented professional software. These two things can live in harmony and are necessary for each other.
The Electric Zine Maker grew to support countless other silly, strange, and unusual tools for this reason.

Another interesting thing about developing the Electric Zine Maker, which I also observed in other “low-stakes” tools like Bitsy, or Pico-8… is that simplicity in your own development choices as you build makes it much more welcoming to others that might want to extend your tool.
When I decided on how to approach “saving your work” in the Electric Zine Maker, I was looking at a lot of options.
Some more complicated ones would have involved more arbitrary formats…
It took a lot of late nights looking into all sorts of complicated sounding things that I remember more as a fever dream than anything I can recall to properly convey here…
I eventually decided to keep it as simple as possible and just output to a folder called “Zines” on your desktop. Inside of “Zines” is a folder named after whatever you named your work, and (inside that folder) is each panel of the zine, saved as a .png titled after the page number.
Each panel is saved as just a number, not names, so it’s incredibly simple to load and save your work.
Because of this you can easily take your zine, import your panels into Photoshop, and work on it there. You could just use the Electric Zine Maker for the templates, and not as an art tool. This made collaboration simpler.

– https://jeremyoduber.itch.io/js-zine

Also, because of that simplicity… another developer, Jeremy Oduber, created an HTML5 reader for publishing Electric Zine Maker zines for the web. It features this adorable page turning effect, and you can have your zines running in your website.
Credit to this, most Electric Zine Maker zines are shared as HTML files online, instead of just boring pdf’s, or as a template. It made the entire project even more accessible.

I don’t think it would be half of the program it is today without that one feature built by another person. This was made possible because the entire thing was simple enough to extend.
As developers, I think it’s easy to forget that simple, low-fi, is often good. Lower the bar for others. Big fancy impressive-sounding technical decisions often work against us.

When you create a tool, platform, or anything, it’s a collaboration between you, the computer, and the community that uses it.
No matter how eccentric, weird, arbitrary seeming the tool. People will love to use it. People love low-stakes niches. Participation is what makes our digital culture so special. It’s easy to underestimate these low-stakes things, but there are plenty of examples for how they take off because they are so accessible to anyone.

If we leave behind the standard practices, conceptions, and ideals about what a program (or even what a game, what the internet…) “should be”, then we have this massive unexplored creative space. The possibilities here are endless for inventing new modes to be creative. Inventing new ways that a community can exist around something. Even empowering people to view what they are doing in a new positive light.
This empowers a type of uniqueness only possible in a digital context. The digital world lets us explore unimagined “what if’s”. It lets us explore concepts we would never be able to in real life, because we can create things that are so singularly weird.

If you think about it, even early Twitter was viewed as useless. They had to convince people that a character limit was a cool thing. That limitation ended up being what made it the social media platform that it became.

Limitations can empower us. As game designers we can embrace that and invent positive alternatives.

Links in this slide…
– https://enginesdatabase.com/
– The Generous Space of Alternative Game Engines
– Cool Tools
– Microsoft Graveyard
– Killed by Google
– Killed by Tech

Scandals surrounding Unity have been an unfortunate reality for a lot of developers. I’m old enough to remember when Unity was not a mainstream tool at all but just becoming a competitor to Flash development. Unity was for the underdogs. It was an indie tool.
It still amazes me when I see how mainstream it is. It’s something that companies now use, with job listings involving it.
Unity became successful because of all the “little people” that used it. We made it what it is. It’s easy for a company to lose sight of that, but in the grand scheme of things that keeps happening.
When a tool dies because of bad leadership, arbitrary decisions from the company that owns it, or any number of unfortunate things, it’s a sadly massive loss. A tool represents a piece of digital history. A tool is a lot of effort on part of everyone that participated to make it what it is. It’s an evolution in use-cases, feedback, and prioritizing various needs that shapes it. Every tool is unique for that.
I dearly miss Flash and don’t think anything ever really replaced it.
We where at that point again, where we saw the same thing happening to Unity.
I saw a lot of teachers completely panicked by these decisions wondering what they will teach their students now that Unity is on such shaky ground. Some even give up entirely teaching one tool because it’s so hard to promise a future in the game industry to begin with.
I think these are interesting things to observe… When our reliance on that one standard gets uprooted, it reminds me that ultimately the principles surrounding good game development are engine agnostic.

The very good programmers I know are comfortable enough with reading and writing code that they can look at a language that they never used before, and understand what that language is trying to accomplish. Working with that new language doesn’t present a major hurdle because the underlying structures are all the same.
I often wonder why we are not there yet when it comes to the way we approach game engines.

I recently started building games in Unreal. I got good enough that I can throw something together quickly and understand all the trappings, especially what and why something goes wrong. In retrospect, it wasn’t that hard. I realized that what I know still applies here, and it helped me grow into that new ecosystem. Game design, game development, and all these principles are something I’ve cultivated over many years, the basis of which never change no mater what environment I’m in.

There are so many alternatives. Each presents its own interesting way to make a game.

Good design is platform agnostic. Our skills are platform agnostic. There are basic principles that apply anywhere. I think we fool ourselves into thinking our skills are reliant on any one tool when digital art is so much bigger than that, and so is our participation in that.

Professionally, yes, we need these standards, but (again) Unity became what it was because of the army of hobbyists that used it. Hobbyists have the power to pick and choose alternatives. Hobbyists and indies have the power to platform those alternatives with what they make in them. Indie developers have that sway.
No tool would be what it is if it wasn’t for the indies that made it the mainstream tool that it became. We can use that same drive to empower alternatives.
I think there’s that hope for the future, where we understand that we don’t rely on any one mainstream engine or toolset, but we can conscientiously empower other tools with what we choose to use. Our creative decisions define the future too.
Who do we empower with our choice to use something?
Who do we platform when we create in a tool, use a platform, or participate in a community?
It’s up to us.