The Democratization of Gaming

http://bhargreaves.com/2011/04/democratization-gaming/

by thesyndicate • 15 years ago

4 2 15 years ago

As a non-programmer it breaks my heart that there is no easy on-ramp for the rest of us. When I got started in the old days we had HyperCard which was my tool of choice — you could so real programming on it, or you could do something very simple. Apple killed Hypercard by neglect, but then Microsoft put out Visual Basic. The result? Within a few years they created a monster that would scare away non-programmers. I'm even amazed that tools like Dreamweaver which should make HTML easy for idiots have become these complex beasts.

To me the PC represented a revolution of letting the rest of us own a computer -- and taking it out of the hands of the high priests of mainframes. But I'd like to see the next revolution occur where non-geeks can build apps. No they don't have to be complex apps, but even something that's like the old HyperCard would be cool.

michaelbuckbee• 15 years ago

You should check out Google App Inventor - http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/ - and also GameSalad - http://gamesalad.com/

The latter in particular seems to offer some easy ways to create some interesting games without much development knowledge.

The Democratization of Gaming

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