Innovation driven by Professional Amatures?

[Dan MacDonald]

Fast Company had an interesting article today, stating how professional amatures are the up and comming force behind innovation across a number of fields and industries.

I can't help but draw paralles between the amature revolution described in this article and our own game development industry.


Some professionals will find that unsettling; they will seek to defend their monopolies. The more enlightened will understand that the landscape is changing. Knowledge is widely distributed, not controlled in a few ivory towers. The most powerful organizations will enable professionals and amateurs to combine distributed know-how to solve complex problems.

http://www.fastcompany.com/subscr/87/open_essay.html

I should note that this is not intended as an "us" vs. "them" topic as the quote might imply. But rather that amatures, especially us Indies, have greater affordable access to information and technology for creating games then at any other time in the history of this industry.

[BantamCityGames]

Dan if you keep reading all these articles how do you expect to get Katsu done?!? :p Just Kidding... This is an interesting article and for the past couple years I have thought, "this IS the best time to be an indie game dev".

[kerchen]

No surprise there. Why do you think big companies like EA and Microsoft snatch up small studios as fast as those studios can claw their way to the head of the (indie) pack? "Innovation through acquisition" is the phrase, I believe. Not that every independent studio that gets acquired is an innovation powerhouse, but innovation does usually figure into their success.

[20thCenturyBoy]

But rather that amatures, especially us Indies, have greater affordable access to information and technology for creating games then at any other time in the history of this industry.

Truly. I remember first trying my hand at game programming in pre-Internet days, round about 1993. I had my copy of Turbo C++ and a copy of PC Intern by Michael Tischer (what a great book that was). And er, that was it. I struggled to put it mildly. I didn't know anyone else who was into game programming. Took me another 10 years to get back into it, and now the quantity of information available is staggering. Trouble is, not all the info is useful. It takes considerable skill to sort the wheat from the chaff. Having access to information does not necessarily make it any easier to create games :(

[Dan MacDonald]

I wanted to make games so bad, my first C game was made with the std GDI routines (for dos). I was exstatic when I found "Tricks of the Game programming Guru's" (the first and last lamothe book worth the price of admission?) for sale at my local bookstore in the programming section. For the longest while there was only one or two books in that section. (it was included with all the photoshop and 3dsMax books).

Now when I go into a bookstore, game programming has it's own dedicated section and in most cases takes a substantial amount of bookshelf space.

[20thCenturyBoy]

Now when I go into a bookstore, game programming has it's own dedicated section and in most cases takes a substantial amount of bookshelf space.
You'll know the market's saturated when game books take up more space than MCSE books! :D

Speaking of LaMothe, I've got his 2nd Edition TotWGPG which has a lot of DX7 stuff. I'm hoping it will give me a good start.