Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

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It's actually kind of fascinating that the HN shortened title omits "games," which is really what this document focuses on. Specifically the document investigates "EASTL", i.e. the Electronic Arts STL, and how its learnings can be applied to the common STL.

The actual title: "Towards improved support for games, graphics, real-time, low latency, embedded systems."

These little pieces of censorship—that's not a sign that for some reason, we really don't like to talk about games. There's no pervasive second-class-citizenry attitude towards gaming. I don't really know how to interpret the omission, other than it's a little piece of little consequence.

Gaming keeps surfacing in places big and small as a motivation behind some technical or business innovation. Here we get very real improvements to the STL. This certainly matters: we celebrate Quake's square-root estimation trick as a cultural artifact, evidence of the beauty of programming. Elsewhere, in recent news, we hear Stewart Butterfield's narrative, which was as much about Flickr and Slack as it is about his twice-failed game concept. Lots of ideas and characters in the tech world have touched gaming in one way or another.

In my personal background at my startup, I keep running into folks pushed out of gaming. They start making "apps." Surrounded by app people, I might miss that a third of all new apps in the App Store are actually games[0]. Even then, games are disproportionately represented in Apple Design Awards. It's tough to get an accurate figure we'd all agree on, but I believe games are nonetheless also overrepresented in revenue (definitely from the looks of top grossing, if we're strictly speaking about mobile software).

If we really want to talk about software, I'd expect 1/3 to 1/2 of the content on the front page to actually be about games. It's certainly what most software people are working on, and it is probably where the plurality of the money is made. I'm not going to speculate as to why (I'd leave that for certain ex-Google developers, who possibly wanted to make a card game all his life). Here, we're actually seeing gaming omitted from the title, as though it's verboten.

[0] http://www.pocketgamer.biz/metrics/app-store/

>It's certainly what most software people are working on, and it is probably where the plurality of the money is made.

Not sure where you got those ideas, but they're not even remotely true. Enterprise, while boring as all hell, is _huge_. The largest software vendors are (consistently) Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and SAP[1]. According to Gartner, software was a $407.3B industry in 2013, and enterprise driven companies accounted for nearly half[2]. The video game industry pulled in $887M in 2014[3]. Not even close at .21%.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_industry#Size_of_the_i...

[2]: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2696317

[3]: http://www.statista.com/statistics/201093/revenue-of-the-us-...

You misread that chart; The video game industry pulled in $887M in the US in One Month (February) of 2014. For scale, bear in mind that GTA5 made worldwide revenue of $1billion in it's first three days.

If we go by Gartner[1], the games industry was predicted at $93billion in 2013. That's over 21%, so a couple of orders of magnitude more than 0.21%.

[1]:http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2614915

You're right; I can't tell where exactly that 407B number comers from. It's irrelevant though in the context of what I was refuting, i.e., the claim that "most" software devs are in the game industry, which is ridiculous.

> software was a $407.3B industry in 2013

And that's not counting embedded software, which is often sold as part of a hardware package.

You're getting it backwards. Games are prominent because it's in their modus operandi. Their relationship with tech remains symbiotic only as long as they can act as a flashy demo. This is a thing that occurs only some of the time, and more often than not, one of the two is compromised.

The other side of it, that a lot of games are made, is mostly reflective of the wishful thinking everyone has about games as a business. There are far more modified WordPress blogs out there than games, and they're probably more successful from a value standpoint.

Still, we discuss games often enough because they have that tendency to keep floating into the consumer space of tech.

Games have been a huge driving force behind tech from the beginning. For example, Unix only exists because Ken Thompson wanted to port his game Space Travel to the PDP-7.

Is this true? That's a great piece of trivia if so.

Yeah, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Travel_(video_game)

I think a moderator restored the original title as we usually do, but thought there wasn't enough room for the word "games" (there actually was, because we don't count " [pdf]" against the 80 char limit, but that isn't obvious). Invoking "censorship" here seems a bit over the top. Besides, games and games development stories are all over HN!

> It's certainly what most software people are working on, and it is probably where the plurality of the money is made.

While gaming does drive innovation and it's a very interesting field, I doubt that's what most software people are working on and surely it's not the biggest sector of software industry in general, it's actually quite small in comparison with many others. That's not to undermine its value, just pointing out the broader perspective.

I certainly didn't truncate "games" from the title myself. Did HN do that on its own?

> censorship

It is censorship in the sense that the original authors' intention is modified to exclude the 'game' factor, but then .. why is this happening in the first place? Why do you think the editing-OP decided to omit this aspect?

> "pushed out of gaming"

There are a couple of schools of thought about 'games programmers' and 'game systems' which can be plotted with wide variance, yet have some interesting points of intersection. For example, the 'factoid' that games developers have a high turn-over/rockstar-phase/kidzone aspect, unless your game is making millions, in which case its serious business and only big boys need apply. So 'game ideology' as an industrious, conscious body of knowledge, has the punk-rock factor, wearing a 2000 dollar suit.

>> we really don't like to talk about games.

Game development as a software ethos, either from consumer or developer side in my opinion, is an interesting quandry.

Many times the notion that you are not making a game if you're making, instead, a business app, or a web scraper, or an OS kernel, and so on .. But actually the notion of game is key to all computing. From a technological perspective, we're all just playing games. Even Oracle has its event and frame "inner loop".

So I think there's an ugly truth about why we "don't like o talk about games", and it is that there is a zen to the subject. The zen is profitable, and it is also deadly.

Keep playing games - no matter where you go and what you do there. Keep making games, too.

>Why do you think the editing-OP decided to omit this aspect?

I didn't.

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