Barriers to Entry of Life



Minecraft

With regard to individual expression, game creation has high barriers to entry. The forms of artistic expression with perhaps the lowest barriers to entry are song followed by drawing, writing, and then music.

Song, apart from recording, need not keep pace with technology. Because it need only keep pace with biological evolution, an argument can be made that the most mature expression of song has already been achieved.

Drawing barely need keep pace with technology. The pigments on cave walls gave way to charcoal, which was honed into the modern pencil. To be sure, the pencil is giving way to the stylus (the mouse was an interesting and outlying transition, and the finger will not be fine enough), but such progress is for distribution purposes only, not for purposes of aesthetic.

Super Meat Boy

Writing "evolves" faster than biological evolution because language serves to reflect the values of the speakers and writers, but the "evolution" is not compelled by technology. Like drawing, the transition of writing to word processing (even speech-to-text) is for distribution rather than aesthetic. Reading is a slow way to receive information compared with multi-sense forms such as video with audio. However, the multi-sense forms are more expensive to produce than writing by orders of magnitude. As the prohibitive costs decrease, writing can be expected to actually evolve away from our current concept of writing and into shared experience. For purposes of this writing, such sublimation means that writing is also mature as far as needing to keep pace with technology.

Music, apart from recording, has been relegated to using technology to more accurately reflect the sound of instruments already in use rather than create new sounds unbounded by physical implementation. This severe introspection indicates the current decoupling of music with the necessity to keep pace with technology.

Game Maker

Game creation is slowly being used for individual expression by those who spend years studying the form. The group-centric nature of game creation dampers expression because the survival of the group depends on catering to broad tastes. Compared to the above forms, game creation is extremely coupled to the pace of technology. Consider that not one in ten can reproduce Pong using present technology, to say nothing of a triple-A title or using the technology with which Pong was actually created, and the high barriers are plain. Indeed, many more than one in ten can reproduce early lullabies, cave drawings, and hieroglyphics. Game Maker is lowering the barriers for the most accepted forms of game creation. As such, Game Maker deserves all the plaudits that can be heaped upon it but few of the criticisms that are. Additionally, the creators of middleware engines are the unsung heroes of the advancement of expression in game creation.

The film industry may be in the beginning of what will be considered the transition from writing to shared experience. By viewing the same film, two people have shared the same experience and created the same memory subject to their personal interpretation of the film. However, a wildly divergent interpretation is an error (or feature) of communication by the film creators.

Dwarf Fortress


The medium of games, of course, is interactive compared to the medium of film. As such, if the path of film leads to shared experience, to what will the path of game creation lead? In other words, what is interactive shared experience? Life?