Prohibition Tossed a Wet Blanket on America’s Inventors

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaica_ginger

A surprising amount of stuff, for example, came out of Chicago between the 80's and 90's. Why? Because amusement manufacturing was located there, so there was a direct crossover from solid state pinball to video games. Williams, Gottlieb and the rest all operated in the area. For similar reasons the bulk of Japan's game output in the 80's came from its three largest cities.

As the industry became more software-driven, it got easier to spread out, and with the merger mania of the 90's pooling up capital, you got the existence of studios with multiple offices in different cities. But you still needed some infrastructure and financing to run a studio, and so most large game studios are in "hip metros" even today.

But when you get down to the realm of current indie games doing digital distribution and Twitch streaming, your physical bottleneck is approximately the same as a writer: fast internet and basic city services. But writers benefit from having a creative circle, salon or similar gathering, and that creates an effect in indie games which I will forever remember from a TIGSource forum thread as the "globetrotting international hipster clique": creators who live very far apart and only see each other at big conferences. Often this ends in people from the same city learning of each other's existence by flying to a different city where a conference is. After you hit a critical mass of people aware of each other in a city, it's just a matter of running a regular local event.

And what I've noticed personally in some 9 years of attending or helping host those events is that while the games scene in a city will derive most of its people from other industries(e.g. in SF you get a lot of tech workers with a hobby project) the way in which it's shaped depends on the type of regular events held and their focus. Some events are focused on business or technical lectures; others are co-working of some form; still others are public-facing showcases. Each of those has their purpose and you do need a sufficiently large city to experience all categories, since without a balance you end up with an average game output that has too little creativity, is poorly shaped as a product, lacks in technical ability, etc. There is a lot of wasted time in indie games that results from someone, somewhere retreating into the work without other eyes on it.

But there are, of course, also very large communities for gaming online, from development to consumption. Most (if not effectively all) "core-CS" innovation takes place at university research groups, corps, and conferences, a much higher barrier to entry than itch.io for instance. CS innovation really requires a large amount of experience in a very limited subfield to make progress.

Game design is just less esoteric than the frontiers of CS imo.

It seems to me that someone who is conservative would be against something like the prohibition both because it changes the status quo and because it results in regulation and a bigger government.

Has this always been the case in the US or has the word conservative changed meaning at some point in history? Did the people who vote for the Prohibition back at the turn of the 20th century identify themselves as conservative? Were they identified as conservative by others around them?

Technology as en enabler of things. Not all tech is easily accessible on day 1 though. Industrialization for example, was capital-intensive, so not everyone could play.

As for music - I'd say that, like software, as the barriers to access and entry were lowered, innovation took off (A-track / cassettes / radio etc..).

As for conservatism - that can come in many flavors. We really should appreciate the amount of innovation that takes place on a farm.

Prohibition was a social-progressive movement, driven by the same sort of people that advocate decriminalizing drugs these days.