From monopolies to tiny tools by solo devs

This is the talk transcript of the keynote I gave at IEEE CoG 2024. All links in the slides are conveniently laid out so anyone interested can follow these wonderful history tangents. Thank you for having me!

I’m Nathalie Lawhead and I go by alienmelon online and in my work.I’m an experimental software developer and game designer.

My work revolves heavily around exploring interactivity and the intersection between software, tools, toys, and art.

My passion is when software is both creative and creatively empowering. I think there’s an underrecognized power behind a creative person coding something, publishing that, and it empowering others to be creative with that. It’s such a fundamental concept to computers. It’s a creative upward spiral that keeps on giving.

– Links in this slide…* First encounter: COMPUTE! magazine and its glorious, tedious type-in code* “My whole career in computer tech started with that one little BASIC program”* “Fun fact. One rather uncommon way of distributing software was via… radio broadcast.”* https://mastodon.social/@muzej

I find the way that this evolved as part of computers such a beautiful thing. The fact that computers are personal. That you have a machine where your virtual life and creative life exists. The fact that the desktop was called “Home”…

The concept that creatively existing here is so much of a fundamental part of computers that you can look back to when magazines were dedicated to sharing code that people could follow along with to build a game that someone made, and that hobbyists could distribute their personal work via floppy disks… to today where we are used to seeing this same dynamic happening with web apps and indie games.

– Links in this slide…* “‘An Open Letter to Hobbyists’ is a 1976 open letter written by Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, to early personal computer hobbyists, in which Gates expresses dismay at the rampant software piracy taking place in the hobbyist community, particularly with regard to his company’s software.”

* “This was the marketing function and the hobbyists did the marketing with a complete antipathy of the company in question. There were other BASICs and, you know, some of them might even have been better[…] he did amount to something and it was in a certain measure because of what we did,that he said we shouldn’t do, we were thieves to do it, and all.”

“The industry needs the hobbyists”

Solo developers are critical participants in this space. They always have been.

I’m also equally as fascinated, and morbidly humored, by past controversies surrounding hobbyist development and the friction against those that make money.

For example Bill Gate’s “An Open Letter to Hobbyists”, written in 1976, in which Gates expressed frustration with hobbyists who used his company’s software without paying for it. Then hobbyists responded by arguing that it was popular because of them.

All this is very reminiscent of present day social media controversies too.

Software is also dramatic it seems.

I make this point because this, the way hobbyists are viewed as either a nuisance or looked down on as “just hobbyists” (the implication being that work is only valuable if it makes money), has always existed.

Recent views about solo development in the game industry and how it’s only “hobbyist work” until it makes a lot of money, then it is professional, are similar.This type of friction is not new.

I agree with the continued relevant statement that the industry needs hobbyists.

I’ll give some context to my work now…

Some time ago I made a throwback to the glory days of desktop publishing called “The Electric Zine Maker“.

It’s a program that kind of straddles the intersection between a toy, tool, and game. It helps you easily make and assemble zines by making the entire process print ready so you don’t have to mess with complicated templates.

The program offers a variety of zine formats such as the classic 8-page fold, more complex ones like tiny books, ridiculously tiny books that you can fit in a matchbox, or infinite page templates like the tetraflexagon. Which is something of a math toy.

If you chose a template you are taken to a UI where you can select each page out of that template. Once you select a page, the drawing tool opens where you can draw on the page with a very large variety of both useful and useless tools.

Originally the Electric Zine Maker was supposed to be just a black and white drawing tool with some basic text functionality, made for me and my friends. I couldn’t imagine that something so silly, weird, and even zany would take off… Like do people even want to create things in something so different?

But it did!

As it grew, the tools got weirder because that’s what people enjoyed about it.

At one point I even added a “scream into the void” feature which completely scrambles you art… for artists that need to take out their existential dread on their zines. You click a button and the program screams while distorting the art on the page.

The tools in the Electric Zine Maker serve a specific purpose to cheer people up and eliminate the pressure of perfection.

Modern software is very productivity oriented. Everything serves the purpose to be professional. These programs themselves can be very intimidating and non-creative spaces to exist in. Photoshop itself does not look creative. It is hard to call creating in it “fun”.

The drawing tools in the Electric Zine Maker involve throwbacks to things like Kai’s power goo, where you can smoosh your art, or let you paint with animated gifs… The idea of “drawing a line” in the Electric Zine maker is very virtual. It does not strive to imitate real world drawing. It is meant to be a digital fantasy of what art, lines, and drawing tools are.

There are a lot of throwbacks to old Flash experiments in the tools…when image distortion demos were popular. In a way it’s also a project meant to preserve many of these old popular code-memes that developers used to share.

When you make art in the Electric Zine Maker you are making art with a small puzzle piece of internet history, when these visual experiments done in Flash were very popular and widely shared.

It’s my way of expressing that software can be art. Software can be individualistic, weird, different… and embraced for that.

It’s by no means a new thing. We have a history of KidPix, 3D Movie Maker, or the Creative Writer suite by Microsoft Kids. It’s hard to imagine that a company like Microsoft would have put out things like this, but it exists in people’s nostalgia.

To me this sort of thing reads as more than just nostalgia. It presents a big “what if” to software. If it could have gone a different route, and stayed more hobbyist, how would it have looked?

It’s an entirely different history that we can learn from and incorporate into what it means to make software.

– Links in this slide…* The Joy of Silly Useless Software* Make Tiny Weird Software, Please! (all about desktop pets, old computer eras, and virtual toys)* About desktop pets & virtual companions: discussing the inhabitants that fill the void of our digital spaces* desktop pets & virtual companions…

For example, when I was young and finally had an internet connection I would spend hours downloading weird experimental parody programs, toys, or desktop pets from hobbyist developers… I loved how these silly things empowered you with the ability to change the desktop environment into something fun. They filled this virtual void with their presence and made it a home.

I still have some of the things I saved. This sort of software was by no means a fringe thing. It was popular. Enough so to have nostalgia for desktop pets.

I think it’s so fascinating that when you make something like this, the absolute love people have for it.

A long time ago I started making this parody software called “potatoware“. It started with this inherently useless desktop companion called an “Electric Love Potato” which was just a potato that would take up a huge chunk of window space, and uselessly sit there while enthusiastically commenting on everything you were doing. It would occasionally ask you for permission to sing to you, interrupting what you do with an annoying prompt. If you chose “yes” it would awkwardly serenade you. It also offered a constant stream of potato recipes.

This was a joke. I made it to make people laugh. It took off as a meme with streamers making reaction videos to it.

The response was kind of overwhelming. Enough for me to make a version 2 with more features (like watering, and combing your potato)… and a music player where you could import your music into it and the potato playing your music would interrupt the songs, enthusiastically commenting on why it likes your musical taste.

All the features in these are specifically designed to make you laugh. Like with the desktop potato, there’s a feature where it can get attacked by files on your machine. If you don’t defend it, it will turn into a rock. Then you have a digital pet rock on your computer which does absolutely nothing.

Exploring the theme of parodying software, I even went on to making a fake virus scanner that acted like a prison industrial complex for your filesystem.

You would run it and it would randomly accuse your files (like images, or text documents it found anywhere on your machine) of being a virus.

Because the authority figure said so, then it must be true. The files on your machine are all conspiring!

You could put these files into interrogation (where your file would plead with you that it’s innocent), the file lineup (where you could choose the most suspicious looking document), or straight to the file prison where you made a fictional currency from your file inmates. The virus scanner supposedly “runs” in the background, but it’s so intrusive with all the pop ups that appear, gossiping about what files are potentially doing and asking you to act on that information, that you can’t do anything else while it runs.

There is a “win” state which you can unlock by playing this accusation game long enough (or better yet “buy” victory with the fictional currency), meaning that the “scan was completed” and it found nothing really wrong with your machine in the end.

This sort of thing functions as turning your actual desktop into a playground or space for a game.

I think that’s a fascinating tangent to explore with software. It can be a conduit to a fantasy reality, blurring the line between where the fiction starts and the software stops. For example, the fantasy console movement is a beautiful thing to observe.

– Link in this slide…https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_video_game_console

A fantasy console is an emulator for a fictional game console. It’s a programmer fever dream and giant “what if this thing existed” brought into practical reality that invites others to participate and make games for it. There are many of them.

I think it’s fascinating because it’s very much a nostalgia for a thing that never existed. So I think it goes to show that people love looking at computers in a different light, one that breaks free from the mainstream ideals.

– Links in this slide…* “The name resulted in criticism and mockery. Forbes expressed a fear that the console would be seen as juvenile. BBC News reported the day after the name was announced that “a long list of puerile jokes, based on the name,” had appeared on the Internet. Some video game developers and members of the press stated that they preferred “Revolution” over “Wii”. Nintendo of America’s Vice President of Corporate Affairs Perrin Kaplan defended the choice.”

* “In one version of this ‘mad rush video,’ fans go right by the PlayStation booth without stopping,” I continued. “They go right to the Nintendo booth and begin lining up to see Wii and DS. You can see Sony executives just shaking their heads in wonder!”

It’s also worth pointing out that when Nintendo first announced the Nintendo Wii the jokes about the name where almost unbearable. There was buzz, speculation, outrage, confusion, excitement… at how absolutely different of a pivot the Wii was, as compared to other consoles which were chasing “next gen” at the time. The Wii came along in a totally different direction, especially with the controls which were a very unusual way to interface with a game.

When the Wii launched it completely captivated a new market, it gave casual games a type of validation too.

It was accessible to independent game developers and small teams and offered a less expensive route to distribute such games that didn’t involve retail.

I point all this out because there’s power in experimentation. In going against the grain. It lets us fall in love with computers, software, games… all over again.

Not in the “disrupt” Silicon Valley buzzword sense, but as something that can matter to people.

In terms of all my weird odd joke programs. People like it. It makes them laugh. There’s a novelty to re-discovering that software can be something else. It does not have to serve a purpose like photoshop, or how a video game serves a purpose, it can just exist to make your digital space weird. They are digital toys.

There is a power to that: when developers reject the idea that everything made needs to be part of a monetary feedback loop, and can just make things that break that established pattern of use, monetization, productivity, corporate branding that exists in every part of the desktop…Being part of a long history like this, software is meant to be weird. Computers are silly. Hobbyists are at the heart of this.

You can see this beautiful intersection between software, tools, toys, and art with older examples like KidPix, or Dabbler. There was an underlying philosophy behind these tools that was driven more by experimentation and exploring “what if”, without the established commercial standards and expectations of what software “should be”: maximizing output.

– Links in this slide…* Plundercore (Not By Me Mostly)* desktop pets & virtual companions…* https://www.alphabetagamer.com/* https://wfgames.net/

For illustration purposes I think it’s important to point out that Unity became what it is because of small independent developers and hobbyists using it. Unity was the underdog at one point, made popular by the underdogs.

Then Unity grew to being the standard, arguably also kicking to the curb the very people that made it what it is with it’s recent list of bad decisions and controversies.

Flash became what it was because of all the “little people” using it.

I would argue that it is the individual’s exploration of personal expression in this digital realm that is what makes being on computers worthwhile. Without it this place would be boring.

It’s what makes this place relevant to everyone.

There’s a massive wealth of developers out there making beautiful individualistic artistic tools and often releasing them as free.

– Links in this slide…* Cool Tools* https://tinytools.directory/

• “Nonetheless, I think at least some of the rhetoric of disruption depends on actively misunderstanding and misrepresenting the past.”“Indeed, there is an odd tension in the concept of disruption: it suggests a thorough disrespect towards whatever existed previously, but in truth it often seeks to simply rearrange whatever exists.”– The disruption con: why big tech’s favourite buzzword is nonsense

Software is a participation. The internet is a participation. It is only meaningful because everyone else is here, participating. Without that it would have no meaningful cultural impact or relevance. That cultural impact can’t be quantified by monetary output.

This infinite growth that eats the world, only to please the investors and capital, is reducing technology to an abstract concept and nuisance rather than something that is relevant in people’s lives.

I make all these points, and illustrations, because I think we are in a very interesting and determining point in this computer, software, and creative evolution.

Between AI controversies, which I’m sure everyone has had an earful about already, the way the disgruntled user base of any company that is promoting AI seems to be against it, and scandals surrounding bad decision making from software companies like Adobe or Unity… The later having been a talking point among game devs for a long time now… I wonder where individual participation is going to end up.

– Links in this slide…

* “‘The internet, the first many-to-many medium, was going to liberate us from the tyranny of centralised media and the rancid consumerism that says we are merely receptacles for what Big Business, including Big Media, wants us to buy,’ writes Dan Gillmor, a San Francisco-based writer, in We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People for the People. ‘But the clampdown has begun. Everywhere we look, the forces of centralisation and authority are finding ways to slow and, perhaps, halt altogether the advances we’ve made.’”

* “The disappearance of the early Web’s anonymity will matter little to them because they never will have experienced it.”

* “Applied to all web users, data sovereignty means giving individuals complete authority over their personal data. This includes the self-determination of which elements of our personal data we permit to be collected, and how we allow it to be analysed, stored, owned and used.This would be in stark contrast to the current data practices that underpin big tech’s business models.”

It’s so fascinating to watch the shift in this conversation. When the concept of “data sovereignty”, and individual authority over their data, because data is the gold being mined for advertisers… is now turning into conversations about AI. The same concepts are still relevant.

Say what you will but when even a social contract like robots.txt is being brought into question as “legally binding or not” (such is the case with AI companies scraping the internet), it worries me that this established level of trust that existed here (out of a general respect for all participants in this digital landscape), is looked down on as irrelevant.

Technology seems to no longer be for the people, but some giant shifting buzzword there only to serve investors and infinite growth.

“People are now afraid to share art.”– Social media criticism or AI

Are we seeing another digital golden age end? Who will benefit from being creative here in the future?

Who will be ruled out?

Who controls this landscape and who is it really preferring?

The space is changing to make individual creation hard, for artistic software too.

I say this because when I started creating art on computers, the bar for entry was much lower.I didn’t need a lot to make or distribute it.

No annual licenses, no heavy payment toward storefronts, no signing my app with a complicated and expensive process, no paying for certificates to sign with, no reoccurring creative cloud fees. I just needed my computer.

Distribution was simple too. What I made would run on someone’s machine without them having to jump through hoops to run it, because a modern system might flag my freeware as a security risk, because I didn’t have the means to distribute it on an arbitrarily expensive and complicated storefront. These often require annual fees, and have many censorship issues or restrictions that frequently exclude experimental work.

I often bemoan how hard it is to distribute independently built software without it being flagged as a virus. The Electric Zine Maker gets a false positive as one often.

This frequently happens to all my work.

There’s reoccurring fees to signing with a proper certificate, or other means, that often eclipse what I can financially afford.

Is fun experimental freeware becoming a thing of the past? It does not seem right that the only people who can afford to participate here, and even make these driving decisions, are corporations.

* Tetrageddon.com

I grew up learning how to host and maintain my own websites. It’s by no means a difficult thing to do. I always believed it’s a basic skill necessary in order to maintain creative independence.

Many after my generation have no idea that this is a thing you can do, or where to start. Just plain HTML, vanilla javascript, and a host, isn’t really a concept to them.

At best, web development is a complicated maze of javascript frameworks and dependencies.When I started making things I could make a game in Flash, host it in the browser, and an overwhelming mass of people could play it. The numbers were ridiculous as compared to today.This trajectory was the beginning of many game developers and studios.

Also, compare this ease of access to those trailblazers and developers before my time, that had their legendary beginning inventing software, or building beautiful computers in garages (like the humble beginnings of Apple)…

This current new generation no longer has access to this type of entry level.

The current generation needs trust fund money, seed money, angel investors… just to cover the basic costs of building and distributing software the proper established way.

It’s worth pointing out that this radically changes the landscape in terms of the type of person that successfully exists here.

The bar is raised unreasonably high to have that type of old-school independence.

The irony is that the bar for entry was raised by the very people who benefitted from it being so low.

This new upcoming generation of developers (kids these days) learned from behind walled gardens. For example, someone that makes a game in Roblox cannot distribute it as an .exe in the traditional sense where they really own it independent of Roblox. These things are often locked in the platform and mostly benefits the platform holder. This wasn’t the case for someone like me. My normal, even when young, was owning my work and distributing it freely to anyone with a computer.

The normal for the new generation is much more controlled.

Loss of tech literacy is a scary reality to consider, especially when you grew up with this type of freedom in websites, software, games, digital art… and you see younger people not know what a filesystem is because they grew up with walled gardens, apps, and the cloud.

I often wonder who benefits from this ignorance, and how can hobbyists push back against that?

What does all this mean for the next generation of developers if they are used to walled gardens and this type of control?

How do we maintain tech literacy so that the next generation remembers that this type of software freedom is for them too? …That it’s even a concept or something they should have.

If you are knee deep into making this type of art, that has little or no return on investment because it’s “just not about the money”, then it goes without saying that you wonder how much longer you can keep existing here without being priced out of participation.

What is the future going to be like for artists like me?

Will we be able to keep making our work?

Who will own it? Who will have the right to it?

Another example I’d like to draw on. Early social media or online spaces, like MySpace, GeoCities (a communal way to have a website), Neopets… Let people customize their pages with whatever CSS wizardry they wanted.

A lot of people I know “learned how to code” by customizing their pages for these sites. It’s how they started on their path.

That gave a level of unique personal expression to how anyone existed online.

Today’s social media does not offer this. I think it’s a fascinating transition from people-first to the brand of the owning entity being first.

– Links in this slide…* https://mmm.page/* https://neocities.org/* https://archive.org/web/geocities.php* https://gifcities.org/

Before most of our online life was funneled through a handful of large websites… Early websites were just as unique and common as early hobbyist software. There was a novelty to picking your very own domain name, and hosting whatever you wanted on it.

People had websites for their pets. Joke websites. Special interest websites. Websites became a form of artistic expression.

It was all so new and liberating. You could find your voice and exist on your own terms. You needed no one to do that. Just your own technical resolve.

Each website was a unique portal into someone’s world.

Places like GeoCities consolidated a lot of that into “one place” because they made the technical hurdle easier, but (in a way), as much as I like to sing praises to GeoCities, that consolidation (or centralization if you will) is a continued core problem when it comes to trusting an entity that becomes a portal to some aspect of our online existence.

We see it often that once the “new fun space” or “new fun tool” is established and becomes a proper corporation, and once we develop a dependency on them, they will eventually exploit their user base.Exploitation seems inevitable, even a requirement, under the shadow of profit growth over all else.

– Links in this slide…* https://flashpointarchive.org/* Lost media: Four web games that can’t be played anymore

Pieces of internet history have been lost because of some decision arbitrarily made by people in a board room, or changes to a Terms of Service… This is the same for any technology. Flash for example.

Digital art is a snake eating its own tail.

When personal power is handed to a larger entity for the sake of convenience, we’ve time and time again lost historic parts of internet spaces (work, art, communities) when that larger entity either shuts down, sells, or betrays the community relying on it.

What we lost is dismembered and reconstituted for the next rendition of tech capital. Many of these concepts we view as new and innovative today are not that new.

– Links in this slide…* “In the case of blockchain, it’s so much obscured by the speculative value of cryptocurrencies, which are just basically a speculative asset.”* TotalRecall – a ‘privacy nightmare’?

BonziBuddy was once criticized for being malware. Today’s versions of Microsoft Windows far eclipse what malware of yesterday was. Consider controversies surrounding Microsoft Recall, an AI feature that screenshots everything.

Are we frogs in the hot boiling water of this new digital age?

With the way this landscape is shifting to prefer the needs of corporations, and funnel so much of us into specific walled gardens, can the entire concept of hobbyist work, alternatives, and experimentation survive?

Can we keep this dream of creative independence alive for the next generation?

In any case there is always an abundance of alternatives made by hobbyists, small devs, or independent teams that exists as the better healthier option.

These initiatives often don’t get the attention they need. There’s so much out there but it’s often not talked about.

For example, I can NOT count the number of game engine alternatives that exist.

– Links in this slide…* Solo-Devs and Risk-Takers (An Artistic Exploration of Experimental Tools)* The Generous Space of Alternative Game Engines (A Curation)* Writing about tools…

I think a pattern has been established in the history of digital art, and our online life, that if you are funneled through relying on these spaces and tools run by very large corporations we will keep losing in this cycle of capital and growth above all else.

In many ways, AI critics still maintain a level of culpability because most criticism of AI does not criticize the consumerist system that this technology finds itself in…

If it would not be AI. It would be something else, because in this sense, technology has no more relevance beyond increasing profit to shareholders.

The groundwork has long been laid where we exist online, according to the terms and conditions of another entity that is allowing us to exist on their platform, we create content and value for them, which the entity has a right to exploit.

Most social media platforms reserve the right to license anything a user posts on the site royalty-free.We’ve been reduced to scrape-able information a long time ago.

– Links in this slide…* “The notion that computers might empower individuals and so transform their social worlds did not simply grow up alongside shifts in computing technology; rather, it had to be linked to the machines themselves.”* “It’s very hard to convince somebody of a thing when financial gains depend on them believing in it.”

I believe the internet and computers are inherently socialist. The basis of it was always empowerment, freely sharing, and communal growth. Controlling that is counterproductive to the original ideals and philosophies that shaped it.

The internet took hold because it benefitted everyone. This type of technology mattered to people and it genuinely made things better for everyone.

Can the same be said about AI? Is web3 just as meaningful and empowering?

Are these new emerging hype-cycle things becoming more and more of an abstract concept with each rendition of a shiny new catchphrase? I’m probably not the only one to admit that it’s harder to understand what any of them mean, every new time around.

In this present day internet nothing maters anymore. No reality. No accuracy of information. Not really art but something else. It’s all food to digest, and regurgitate back to an equally as abstract concept of “consumers”.

– Links in this slide…* “Generative AI could “distort collective understanding of socio-political reality or scientific consensus,” and in many cases is already doing that, according to a new research paper from Google”* https://www.tradingview.com/news/cointelegraph:448cfb276094b:0-microsoft-google-and-others-warn-ai-may-threaten-business/

I have to wonder if all this is meant to become a repetitive bubble that explodes, then rinse and repeat?In light of that landscape, technology doesn’t seem to be for everyday people anymore. It’s for investment, corporations, and power structures too big to really grasp.

Can tech even be truly relevant when it prioritizes stock, value, and money to such an extent that it is willing to alienate its user base?

When people become just numbers, engagement, and a content mill, what meaning does technology have?

It seems to have broken away from actual relevance and become just another pitch to milk…

Until now controversies surrounding AI have ranged from it being an environmental threat (because of the expensive amount of energy it needs), plagiarism issues involved in giving it enough data to function, hallucinations and bias that’s already having a detrimental impact on people, search results and social media being spammed with it giving a type of legitimacy to “dead internet theory” (if dark humor is your thing), and overall concerns about how it’s a new type of misinformation machine because the resulting output is often incorrectly made up.

In a nutshell, many of these issues are already a core problem in the age of social media internet… We’ve probably all heard discussions about how social media empowered fascism, radicalization, misinformation, anti-science beliefs, legitimate concerns about how it’s an echo chamber further fueling all these other traits… but I think that AI compounds this. It’s still the same set of problems that have not been addressed.

In terms of (and largely a responsibility of) “Big Tech” and the social media layer that was imposed on the internet, there are deeper issues that existed here before AI became a buzzword.

Don’t get me wrong. I think all these new developments in AI are very exciting. It goes without saying that much of this is not new. It’s been a dream since ever.

For the purposes of this talk I am refering to the AI umbrella term that has been unfortunately co-opted as a buzzword, not what has existed for a long time.

I think AI in many ways has fallen victim to this buzzword hype cycle and has a lot of ignorance distorting what it is or can be.

I see nothing wrong with machines making art. This has existed forever. I don’t think that can replace artists. Many of these arguments come from a place of fear and a painful amount of ignorance.

I think, generally speaking, these popular arguments against AI run in circles around the actual bigger issue in tech culture.

The context AI hype, promise, and speculation, is happening under is broken. The general system in place does not seem capable of supporting a positive outcome for everyone.

If anything good came from present controversies surrounding AI, it is how it seems to be creating a broader awareness that consumers need to make conscientious decisions about what type of tools they use to make their art, or the underpinnings of the platforms they exist on, and who they are empowering with the decision to participate with said tool or platform.

When Unity announced, following a history of bad decisions, that it would charge a fee for each time a game is installed, it caused a massive outrage. Nobody can afford that.

As a result of the outcry they eventually changed course.

Also as a result of the outcry, alternative engines gained an influx in users.

Godot, a free and open source game engine, received some good attention. Godot seems to be headed in the direction of a mainstream alternative.

– Links in this slide…* https://github.com/paladin-t/fantasy* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87jfTIWosBw

The digital space is by no means at a lack of ways to make games, and even generate a small income from that.

Pico-8 games are sold on Steam. Many of them have good ratings. I’m constantly seeing Pico-8 developers share their game with a large number of wishlists, and it generates enough interest that they keep making them.

Pico-8 is a fantasy console that lets you make web games using tiny cartridges. It’s specific to pixel art and being small. Based on that pitch, it would be easy to dismiss this as a hobbyist thing, but in the end it doesn’t matter what you make your game in. Good games are made with tiny tools too.

These tools are small, and extremely accessible for how easy they are to make things in.

To give you a small idea of the overwhelming wealth of tools out there…

– Links in this slide…* https://gdevelop.io/* https://rpginabox.com/* http://gbstudio.dev/* http://rogueengine.io/* https://gbdk-2020.github.io/gbdk-2020/* https://godotengine.org/* https://thatclowngoddess.itch.io/stimuwrite

For example… GDevelop is an open-source game engine that’s built around a “no-code” type workflow that makes it very welcoming to beginners. It’s a wonderful starting point. It has a large community that’s constantly sharing resources, and is both helpful, and welcoming. It’s focus is on browser games… Rogue Engine is another that outputs for the web, and I think it’s an incredible achievement. It’s like Unity but entirely specific to web games.

– Links in this slide…* http://downpour.games/* https://zonelets.net/* https://pikimov.com/* https://github.com/yurisizov/boscaceoil-blue* http://bitsy.org/* https://1oogames.itch.io/lovely-composer* http://1bitdragon.com/

Or there’s Downpour, which is this beautiful tool for making games using what your phone does… Like photos, drawings, text, and letting you collage all that together with interactivity. You can share what you make with others. Or there’s a number of music making tools that are uniquely adorable, like Lovely Composer which very much feels like making music on a console.

Bitsy is something that always needs to be mentioned for the very large, supportive, and creative community it has. It’s done a lot for making game creation accessible to the type of person that would otherwise be very intimidated by the process.

– Links in this slide…* http://beyondloom.com/decker/* https://bevyengine.org/* https://ctjs.rocks/* https://www.raylib.com/* https://ebitengine.org/* https://defold.com/* love2d.org

I absolutely love projects like Decker. It’s this old school HyperCard like multimedia platform for creating and sharing interactive documents. You can use sound, import images (which then get this beautiful dithered black and white treatment), and plenty of scripting so you can do interesting things. You can make fairly involved projects with it. Sharing it is easy because it’s all browser based.

The slide also features a number of other more popular alternative game engines. They each have their own strengths, and interesting things to offer.

– Links in this slide…* https://www.wickeditor.com/#/* https://mmm.page/* https://enginesdatabase.com/

Things like Wickeditor are really interesting because you can make browser based work using an editor that also runs in the browser. Wickeditor is basically a simplified Flash, you can create art and code in it. It’s beautiful, and fairly flexible too.

MMM.page is another incredible initiative, and I love the driving philosophies behind it. It’s about going back to what made the internet worth being on, and it also has this fun DIY feel to working in it. It lets you drag and drop to assemble pages, and that feature alone is what makes websites that you can create in it very unique.

All alternatives need is attention.

As game developers, as artists and hobbyists, we have an incredible amount of power together. As creative participants in the digital realm we have more power to control this narrative than we realize.Again, Unity became what it was because of hobbyists. Early Unity was dismissed as just a silly indie tool for unserious games.

Today it’s a mainstream tool.

Photoshop and Adobe had humble beginnings too.

For every mainstream tool, there are a dozen free and open source alternatives that are often very powerful if you give them a chance.

There’s a responsibility for us, as hobbyists, artists, and developers, to be conscientious about the tools we use and promote through that use.

When we chose tools we should also chose in a manner that empowers tool developers that are offering alternatives.

Similarly, as developers, we have the power to create alternatives. That know-how, ability, means, and access… to create something like a tool and distribute it is not to be taken lightly or for granted. Even the smallest efforts matter to people.

The internet is a participation, and we can build better venues for participation.Our participation needs to be a conscious decision.

Hobbyists are not only necessary but we are the alternative.

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