How Three Kids with No Experience Beat Square and Translated Final Fantasy V | Hacker News Reader

How Three Kids with No Experience Beat Square and Translated Final Fantasy V

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161 pointswallflower95 comments

A long time ago, I translated Civilization 1 to Brazilian Portuguese. Eventually (like, 15 years later?) I got to work for a guy that worked on CIV I, and he told me they just found my translation, fixed some stuff and put it up as the official one (I put it in the most popular BBS at the time)

Good times.

Wow, what a flashback! I remember following various translation teams and their progress while in college and playing all sorts of SNES games I'd never gotten to play as a kid (via zSNES). I remember the drama of the early leak and the eventual "proper" release. Realizing that it was 20 years ago caught me by surprise.

Yeah. I remember playing through all the FF games (and a bunch of other RPGs) that hadn't been translated into English when I was in college in the late 90's. It's great that most of them have been remade since, but there is a lot of nostalgia in playing the originals on emulators.

Projects like this caused me to fall in love with tech as a kid, and my subsequent career arc was largely premised on the notion "how do we bring this type of amazing innovation into safe legal waters and allow it to flourish". I played FFV. I played a ton of fan translations. Heck, I completed the entire SNES rpg catalog, both JP and ENG. Thanks for sharing this.

~~~

Re: Translation and Fan-mods in general. Many game developers fail to recognize that their works inadvertently become platforms, and that the platformization of stellar works is both the cause and effect of their spectacular success. There are a ton of crystal clear examples of this phenomenon. Unfortunately it is tremendously common that developers and publishers chop their own legs out from under them when attempting to re-seize control of these platforms to monetize them. Often their attempts destroy value, and terminally damage their brands.

What good is brand value if you can't monetize any of it?

There are ways to monetize in a respectful way - for example, by making new games in the universe that your previous "platform" made so popular. You don't have to nickle & dime all the time to make a buck.

There's a false dilemma stemming out of the word "any". In reality there's an equilibrium between giving and taking.

If you don't monetize enough, you can't stay afloat as a developer and you're left with a brand asset for sale upon liquidation.

If you take control of community produced goods in order to take the entire pie for yourself, your fanbase will slow or stop producing incidental free value for your projects and your core evangelists will begin jumping ship to greener pastures. This doesn't kill you immediately, but it also doesn't position you for long term growth.

Wow, the modifying assembly code part was impressive! I wouldn't even be able to find the dialog drawing routine amid thousands of lines of undocumented assembly, let alone modify it. It's amazing that a high school kid could figure it out.

To get an idea of how rom hacking works, check out this video from doublefine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FolqIgQRtl0

Its mostly setting watches and breakpoints in the emulator, not digging through code. My mind was blown the first time I watched it.

If you like this kind of thing, just go in and give it a shot! The NES is a great place to start, just three registers and simple instruction set. The display unit ABI is well documented and there's a couple of NES debuggers out there.

Starting with no experience, I wrote a program to dump level images straight from a ROM:

https://gitlab.com/mcmapper/mcmapper/blob/master/main.c

https://tcrf.net/Proto:M.C._Kids

The early stuff he shows can be done on most emulators as a way to cheat. Done it ever so often when i get bored with a game. Sometimes locking the health value will freeze a game though as developers use a cheap refill animation on leveling up or beating a boss, and you end up with the animation getting stuck as the emulator keeps resetting the value.

I have never owned one, but i think gamesharks and others work similarly.

Yes! Gamesharks / Action Replays / similar gave you an "instruction set" of sorts that was interpreted as instructions of sorts - write value to address, do if value at address is X, and so on. When I was messing with one on the Nintendo DS a few years back, you were actually able to write ARM (and THUMB, I believe) ASM and compile it to the target system (NDS) that could be loaded through the Action Replay. I'll have to check if I can dig up my old notes on this stuff when I'm home...

I'd really like to read your notes if you find them. I'm assuming the Action Replay could be used for the first bypass/homebrew loading exploits, then?

I'm not sure; I never got that involved in it. Back when I was involved, there were some communities entirely centered around taking apart individual games and figuring out how to tinker with them. Things like loading up the unused tracks in Mario Kart and changing the colours etc. to make "custom" courses.

Here's one of the main pages I used as a reference at the time: http://doc.kodewerx.org/hacking_nds.html Even without ASM, you could still write to arbitrary memory addresses, jump around with conditionals, patch, copy memory, and all sorts of things. The linked page also touches on the basics of ARM/THUMB ASM tinkering. I seem to have lost my notes, so this is all I can get you :(

Thanks anyway. I really like reading about these "unofficial" devices.

The NES/SNES era had a lot of games that use sprite animation state/OAM memory as the canonical place to hold the current state of something. Often even important, high-level pieces of game business-logic state, were just left as sprite attributes on particular sprites.

Two examples from Super Mario World (which loves this technique):

• You can avoid dying from running out of time in SMW, by simply getting a power-up right as the level timer reaches zero. The level timer just changes the Mario sprite's animation to STATE_DYING (once, when transitioning from 1 to 0); so if you can get the sprite to play a different animation, the game forget that the player was supposed to be dead.

• The "null sprite" glitch: Yoshi 'carries around' enemies in his mouth by just 1. marking the enemy sprite as invisible and intangible, and then 2. storing a pointer to said enemy sprite. If you can get that sprite to unload from OAM memory and get something else to take its place, then when Yoshi goes to spit the enemy out, he'll instead spit out whatever random garbage is now at the OAM location referenced by the pointer.

That video is worth a post in and of itself.

It's about the same as how you'd approach modern programming, except instead of watching variables you'd watch registers and addresses in RAM/VRAM and work backward from there. Hell, you could even look specifically for instructions that manipulated those addresses.

>“It’s hard to express how big of a deal it was at the time,”

Every so often I meet someone who worked on something that was influential on me as a youth. I'm glad I got a chance to read this, playing the rom it was always a mystery where it came from. A lot of us owe Myria a debt of gratitude.

Translating a video game was also one of the primary ways that I learned Japanese. Playing through Chrono Cross while grokking the written form was tremendously rewarding.

To this day, I still choose Japanese audio for games if available.

Pokémon on 3DS is wonderful for learning Japanese. It's a game for kids so it's made up of a lot of kana with some low level kanji.

Unfortunately, even Japanese children are native speakers. I wouldn't recommend going into native material unless one has grammar points and some vocab nailed down, even if the kanji is easy or rare.

...um even if you are entirely swamped and way confused by the dialog it's still pokemon.

You'll be fine.

My niece set her language to German when she played (and beat) Pokemon X. She was probably 6 or 7 at the time, and didn't know a lick of German.

Most text in Pokemon is either completely formulaic ("A wild <Pokemon> appeared!" "Charmander used Ember" "It's not very effective") or a one-off pre-combat joke from a trainer ("I like shorts!"). It's pretty easygoing stuff.

Your advice is common amongst educators these days, but the general consensus in language acquisition research is completely the opposite. If you can understand something, with enough repetition, you will acquire it. Free reading of native material is hands down the most effective way to acquire a second language that we know about.

There are quite a lot of scholarly works accessible from the internet on the topic, so if you are interested I recommend taking a look. I was going to link some examples, but it's probably better for you to find your own way without my biases.

I've read and heard enough Japanese to be able to pick out the differences in VA direction between English and Japanese audio tracks. 90% of the time, I end up preferring the Japanese tracks.

Native audio with English subs for me. It feels rare to find an English dub that's good.

I thought maybe it was just a Japanese thing, but then I watched the (excellent) series Wakfu. The French audio was much bett

I find mind boggling the amount of games that have been released only in Japan.

Even series popular in the West like Final Fantasy, Shin Megami Tensei, Ace Attorney, Fire Emblem have had Japan-only releases, I cannot even imagine how many lesser known titles are lost to western audiences.

Probably Japan is kind of an outlier, but I guess other countries with a large enough market to support games developed for local (not global) audiences would have a similar phenomenon, I wonder if there is some hidden gem developed in China, Korea, India, Brasil that we will never be able to play...

It's way worse if you were European. Did you know that the first OFFICIAL release of Chrono Trigger in Europe was the 2009 DS remake?

Same in Australia, I think. I owned a ridiculous setup with a NTSC->PAL cart converter and an old CRT just to play Chrono Trigger, at one point.

I learned Japanese by osmosis-watching lots of JAV in my younger days forced me to learn in order to identify what was being said to maximize utility.

Our drivers were different but you actually produced a patch enjoyed by a lot of j-RPG fans that came

Japanese Adult Video?

I am so happy to see this article. I used to play the Japanese release PSO with Barubary a LOT and heard bits and pieces about the FFV translation. At the time they were at UCI I believe and I was just in 7th grade. Baru always seemed incredibly skilled and was extremely patient with me and helped me learn some basic coding, such as creating custom names for items that worked online. It got me into engineering in general and though I ended up working in Materials Engineering rather than software it was an excellent influence on me and pushed me to learn by reverse engineering. I always imagined Baru would end up somewhere with a career in Video Game development and am thrilled to see it is true.

I wonder if it's the same barubary. I started a psx dev group in the 90's gridlock. I just finished high school and this kid barubary joined and his work was amazing. Most of us in the scene went into the industry. I didn't cuz I didn't want 80hr weeks.

PSX dev was lots of fun and challenging at the time with so little documentation. Still something I'd love to get back to if I have the time. Someone spun up a site a bit ago called psxdev net that's pretty active. Btw, gadget from gridlock :)

Hey mate!

I remember playing this when it came out! It was such a magical moment. It completely blew my mind that there was a SNES Final Fantasy game that we were never meant to play - I think I only found it accidentally when I was browsing ROM sites. I thought it was a homemade hack or something. I never imagined that it was a real game! Haha what a great memory.

Holy shit, this bring back memories. I did something similar with the Harry Potter series about 15 years ago - beat the publisher to translating the book. Doing that, strangely, is the one event that shaped my life the most.

I discovered Harry Potter series up until book 4 (The Globet of Fire) by renting books from a bookstore when I was 15. At that time, many Vietnamese kids were all eager for book 5 to come out. Except for when book 5, The Half-blood Prince came, we had to wait for it. We would have to wait for the "blessed" translator and the publisher to translate and churn out the whole book when a new book comes, and with all the proofreading it would take about 4-6 months. I decided that was too long and started posting on a quite popular forum my indie translation, then moved to my personal website. Being a 16-year-old having a summer break at that time, I had nothing better to do. My timetable was something like stay up all night to translate half a chapter, post the new translation, go to bed at 6 AM, wake up at 11 AM, the next day rinse and repeat. People loved it and many started contacting me to help with the translation. We had a YUUUUGE following to the point that I had to do nothing but just organizing and assigning who-does-what and then proofread it with my 16-year-old brain, but mostly we flew under the radar and it was easy. The complete translated book came out about 20 days after the English version. The normies still had to wait for the blessed book to read it, but anyone who had the Internet already read the whole story months earlier. People would bring A4-sized printouts to read at school and my older brother was asked more than once whether he knew the person who translated it from time to time.

Book 6 wasn't a happy story but a fun one. When book 6 came, I knew so much better that I knew to appoint someone that did the logistics for me. I did the fun part, code a website that allows us to automate the translation submission and make sure it can handle the traffic. At that time Vietnam has just signed the Bern copyright convention, and my indie translation was the center of attention. In the past book translation, we gave out our real names or real nick-names, however the translator wanted it. We had about 4-5 chapters churned out before we realized that we were in big troubles. I remember one night I received an email to my personal mailbox at 10 PM from a journalist asking something along the lines of "Do you know you're doing something illegal?" I was scared shitless and fucking deleted everything, thinking this is it - this is the end, and went to bed, not responding to the journalist. Then at 5 AM, not being able to sleep, I checked email again and the same reporter sent another email...

"I see that you deleted everything. This is totally not my intention. I won't rat you out. If possible, please let me know if we can do a secret interview. You might think that I am being dishonest but please trust me this time, I want you to continue what you are doing. I hope to see the new chapter coming out tomorrow."

I immediately removed all real names and asked everyone on the team to choose a nickname for themselves. I actually gave out my home address to the reporter and he turned out to be a hipster-looking student studying journalism writing part-time for a newspaper. We became good friends after that. Besides the interview, the translation at that time was so controversial that it sparked the discussion whether it is "right" or "wrong" to do on many online forums. I had google analytics at the time so I knew who was linking to the website. I registered a nickname just to talk my side of the story in one of them. It turned out that the admin of the forum was someone who studied in Princeton and three years later, when I dropped out of college, disheartened by what I saw and discouraged by what happened, he asked me to go study abroad. I would otherwise have never dreamt of doing that. Another online friend who is 40+ at that time asked me to work for him in the gap year, appointed me to his "vice-president" role of his company. The rest is just history. Thanks to the event and all that came after it, I knew probably 50% of all online friends that I admire and probably won't ever know otherwise.

By the way, when book 7 came out (when I was having my "gap year"), I decided not to do it anymore. It was too much to handle. Someone else I knew did it, though.

> book 5, The Half-blood Prince came

small nitpick: book 5 was Order of the Phoenix.

thank you, his entire story just read like gibberish without your correction.

Thanks!

One thing good came out of it, so the indie translation on the book 5 made the 'blessed' translator work around the clock. She has to release her unfinished translations as they came out. She wasn't sure how to translate "The Order of Phoenix" and got it wrong for half of the book (order ~ the order came out of the phoenix's mouth) and then they had to change the translation halfway through (order ~ the group with hierarchy).

We were very quick to realize that was the wrong translation. I was surprised (and somewhat pleased/impressed) that the publisher/official translator didn't refer to what we did to avoid that mistake.

> At that time Vietnam has just signed the Bern copyright convention, and my indie translation was the center of attention. In the past book translation, we gave out our real names or real nick-names, however the translator wanted it. We had about 4-5 chapters churned out before we realized that we were in big troubles. I remember one night I received an email to my personal mailbox at 10 PM from a journalist asking something along the lines of "Do you know you're doing something illegal?"

What illegal thing were you doing? If Terry Brooks can translate Tolkien from English to English without running afoul of copyright, I don't see what copyright would have to say about translating from English to Vietnamese. You're certainly not infringing on the author's original wording.

Is that sarcasm or legal advice? It's not great sarcasm and actively bad legal advice.

It's policy commentary.

If it were legal advice, it would, like all legal advice, come with a little disclaimer saying "this is not legal advice".

> What illegal thing were you doing?

Unauthorized use of a copyrighted work. Translations are included under the category of derivative works, and those have a requirement of lawfulness. They have to be somehow licensed or authorized from the copyright holder of the work they derive from.

The Shannara books were unoriginal, but not to a degree that they'd be considered derivative works.

> The Shannara books were unoriginal, but not to a degree that they'd be considered derivative works.

First, as far as I knew only the first book was unoriginal. But I'm certainly willing to believe others are unoriginal too.

Second, when nobody can read a book without noticing "hey, this is exactly the same story as this other book, but with different names", what's left that both

(1) distinguishes it as "not a derivative work", and

(2) doesn't also automatically apply to any translation into a foreign language?

I have seen it said many times that copyright will not protect ideas, only the particular form they have taken. Without a pretty gigantic loophole, those terms would provide absolute protection to a translation, which necessarily cannot use any wording from the original.

> First, as far as I knew only the first book was unoriginal.

Maybe. It's been a long time since I read the series. I remember getting to the third or fourth and realizing that the plots of later books also seemed to crib off the earlier ones.

(1) The story isn't exactly the same, just noticeably similar. The presentation is also significantly different, with a different premise for the setting and such.

(2) Copyright laws (Berne convention and US copyright law) specifically note translations as being afforded copyright separate from the original work, but falling under the "exclusive rights of authorization" that govern the original work.

The publishing house at the time bought the rights to translate JKR's work, so I think it's probably a gray area at best. I don't think people would make as big of a deal now as they did in the past, though.

It was novel - before the work done by the team, most websites in Vietnam only posted books retyped/digitalized by hobbyists, but no one other than the anime fans who did new translations. It was unsurprising to me to look back, many of the people who helped on the project were anime people. At one time we were having sister forums, Harry Potter and Anime.

Were the anime fans translating their anime from Japanese or English? If Japanese, did they work off of a Japanese translation of Harry Potter? Or was it mainly that anyone from the anime-translating community who could also understand English became interested in your project?

I was not involved in the Anime/Manga scene so I cannot say for sure, but from my understanding, the people who know Japanese and could translate it from Japanese were the minority. There was a blend of English and Japanese sources in the anime scene though. I don't know the exact mixture.

Definitely not for the Harry Potter case. The only source we had for Harry Potter was the English version. It took about 1 day for the English book to be scanned and appear online on KaZaA after the official book release, and leaked versions came up even earlier (but we don't know what was real, many were fanfics and viruses). All translated versions of any language other than English came way later, and as we wanted to consume the books as soon as they were released, English was the only choice.

Great story, thanks for sharing. My online presence and interest in computers were also largely thanks to Harry Potter.

What's your story? :)

This reminds me somewhat of translations of Chinese webnovels. Many of them have hundreds or thousands of chapters, but never see an official English release, so fans would spend years of time translating them and posting them online. I believe one of the most well-known sites for this (wuxiaworld) has actually attained international recognition (ie. been in the news) for it, as well as signed an agreement with the major Chinese publisher of webnovels to continue translating in a legal manner.

Chinese wuxia novels are great. Vietnamese people call it "tiểu thuyết kiếm hiệp" here, the author 金庸 (Jin Young - Kim Dung) is someone everyone in Vietnam knows. They have to be among the most popular items people searched for when the Internet was slow and people went online to just read text.

We use a lot of Chinese phrases ingrained in us from Chinese novels, for example, I still remember vividly the word "ngụy quân tử" - 偽君子 - hypocrite, dishonest man - that is used in Chinese novels - that the journalist I talked about used to describe himself: "You might think I am a 'ngụy quân tử' when I said this to you, but I really really want you to continue. I didn't send the previous email to stop you. Don't stop."

We have a site called Việt Nam Thư Quán that has mainly Chinese wuxia novels. It is among the oldest sites in Vietnamese that is still operational today. It still has my Harry Potter translation version somewhere, I think. I wish I could read more Chinese novels for my own enrichment. Learning Chinese is my pipe dream that I will do... one day.

Great read that brings back some good memories.

As an avid FF fan, I never quite understood why SquareSoft decided to not bring over some of their games to the US market. If anyone happens to know the reason(s) - please share!

For Seiken Densetsu 3, Wikipedia links to an article that stated: "...the game's North American release had been canceled by Square's American branch due to programming bugs that they deemed impossible to fix in a timely manner."

For Final Fantasy II: "the long development time, the age of the original Japanese game and the arrival of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System [...] led Square Soft to cancel work on the Final Fantasy II localization in favor of the recently released Final Fantasy IV"

Similarly for Final Fantasy III: "...Square was focused on developing for Nintendo's new console."

On SD3, I read that the "bugs" are mostly because English text took up more space than Japanese. From an article by Jermey Parish [1]:

"Seiken Densetsu 3 was among the first games to receive a fan translation, and Neil Corlett's localization crew was fairly open about the difficulty of that process. SD3 was a huge game on a cramped cartridge, and the Japanese version -- already benefiting from the density of kanji text -- employed a custom compression system that would have made it practically impossible for a localized version of the game to fit within the confines of the ROM without the removal of massive chunks of content. The simple fact is that SD3 was likely never intended for localization, because the process would have been impossible."

[1] http://www.gamespite.net/toastywiki/index.php/Games/G637-Sec...

Yeah i recall various ROM patches coming complete with special fonts so they could fit the english text into the boxes etc of the original game ui without having to hack in extra pages of scrolling or similar. Kanji allows for some very info-dense UIs.

The same thing applied to Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu 2): the original translation had to drastically simplify/cut details from the English translation to fit into the dialogue boxes, which used a large fixed-pitch English font. There's a ROM patch ("Variable Width Font edition") that changes the dialogue font to variable-width, and uses the additional space to improve quite a bit of the dialogue.

It's worth noting that today, Square Enix is a massive multimedia empire with tons of resources to devote to localization; in the early nineties it would have been a small-ish shop and a localization effort for any given game would have been costlier in proportion to their size even without the additional technical onstacles. So they had to pick their battles as to which games to bring to western markets.

I learned how to program in the Rom Hacking scene and was involved with a team that released 4 patches for games.

The amount of dedication and hours our team put in was incredible. I think I managed around 30-40 hours with high-school.

Also, a lot of the reasons some games never made it stateside or came way late was often financial or political. The US versions of these companies often ran slightly independent from the Japanese game studios and the RPG adoption was not huge in the early console days here yet.

I love stories like this - right from Sneferu in ancient Egypt to a driven high-schooler - drive leads people to great things. And when we see the output we are just left to wonder what fueled it and how we can harness that same drive.

title should be "...Square Enix and...". The company "Square" ≠ "Square Enix"

No, the article is correct. This was before the merger with Enix, and the company was called “Square”, and sometimes used the name “Squaresoft”.

Thanks

Squaresoft was the american subsidiary. The name didn't came out of nowhere

reading about how all these guys were meeting up in IRC's just to hang out makes me miss the old web. Anyone know any welcoming IRCs?

I hope this observation doesn't come across as bigoted or insensitive in any way, but I find it interesting how common transgender people (like the star of this article) are in the emulator/rom dev community. I can think of four or five other very prominent examples just off the top of my head – and it's not a very large community. It's certainly a greater proportion than the general population. Honestly I can think of more trans-women coding emulators than biologically-born women. I just wonder why such an unrelated-seeming correlation occurs.

Many online communities historically have been bigoted and misogynist.

If the effect you observe is real, perhaps it's just the reflection of a community that attracted and kept more people over the years because it wasn't (as much) like that?

Why are there so few biologically born women in those same communities, then?

I have no direct experience, but I would be surprised if that were true. Emulator development is the perfect intersection of, like, three different communities (low-level tech, video games, and open source) that are (at least on HN) perceived as extra-unwelcoming to women. I don't see why combining all three would cancel that out.

I would also note that writing an emulator is not something you just stumble into because the people are friendly or whatever. It requires an extremely honed set of quite niche skills. I think it takes something more to become successful at it than just "I guess I'll stick around because everywhere else is even meaner."

Is that really the case? I think Silicon Valley is perceived as _specially_ unwelcoming to women, not necessarily every computer subculture out there.

My personal guess is that as a traditionally underground community the ROM/emulator scene was more welcoming to certain groups due to the use of pseudonyms. It's easier to not draw attraction when you don't walk into an office every day and meet people face to face.

At this point i find it hard to separate honest problems from SJW shit storms over bike sheds.

That said, the valley's VC fueled death marches, and the resulting bravado and "machismo" probably do not help.

I would also add that with the number of online communities there are, you could almost 'expect' to see at least one community that's largely made of transgender people even when it doesn't really have anything to do with stuff related to being transgender. Emulators probably aren't the only scene like this. That said, it's not like there can't be other factors as well.

I found the opposite was true - People in gaming communities and on anonymous message boards (such as 4chan) are usually very egalitarian.

Most conversations do not require any information about a person's identity, so every idea stands on it's own merit.

The perceived hostility emerges when a person tries to support their viewpoint by irrelevant factors (gender, sexual orientation, race, etc.).

This works fine if you're willing to let everyone believe you are who they assume you are. If you correct someone, you're likely to "perceive hostility."

By correcting someone, you are breaking the unspoken rule of anonymous communities - ideas standing on their own merit, regardless of who you are.

It's the equivalent of walking into an anonymous alcoholics meeting with booze, telling everyone how great it is to drink.

There is no reason for them to cater to you, therefore they want to get rid of you in a fast or fun way. Hostility can be both funny and gets rid of people who do not fit in.

In the words of the /b/east itself:

(Warning: VERY harsh language)

>If I can pontificate a bit for your edification, one of the rules of the internet is "There are no girls on the internet". This rule does not mean what you think it means.

>In real life, people like you for being a girl. They want to fuck you, so they pay attention to you and pretend what you have to say is interesting, or that you are smart and clever. On the internet, we don't get a chance to fuck you. This means the advantage of being a "girl" does not exist. You don't get a bonus in a conversation just because I'd like to put my cock in you.

>When you make a stupid post like "hurr durr i'm a gurl" you are begging for attention. The only reason to post it is because you want your girl advantage back, because you are too vapid and stupid to do or say anything interesting without it. You are forgetting the rules, there are no girls on the internet.

Anecdotally, I was also a member of a small, online, gaming focused community for a long time. It wasn't as directly tied to emulator/roms, but there was definitely a focus on Japanese console games. Over the years, a number of those members have come out as transgender, which has similarly made me wonder what it was about that community that attracted so many people that probably felt ostracized in real life.

I was an awkward kid with few friends, and turned to computers because they were fascinating and more fun than interacting with people.

Could be that people with [insert unusual trait here] are naturally drawn to computers for similar reasons, be they autistic, transgendered, disabled, or just plain weird.

Spending the afternoons with a computer also allows one to avoid more physical activities where one may not perform as well as ones peers.

seriously, my scrawny ass was never good at sports, I had one or two friends growing up at any given time until I was in highschool and starting smoking, which apparently made me cool enough to get to know.

before that, school was misery.

I spent many teenage hours in front of my computer, making friends, some 15 or so years long friendships were born during that time, people I still regularly talk to and spend time playing games with.

I discovered that I did have a skill, when I thought myself directionless and skill-free: I knew how to fix a computer, because I spent so much time troubleshooting my own issues.

Not only that, but when I moved to competitive gaming on my computer, I suddenly realized I was good at competition in some field.

Sure, it wasn't your traditional competitive outlet, but it was one I wasn't picked last in.

Games like Counter-Strike I could come out on top in and feel as if I just won the regional championships, the feeling the kids who were good at physical sports must have felt regularly.

I saw the appeal of regular sports, suddenly. The value of competition and watching someone so much more skilled than you could ever be play a sport at the absolute top-level.

I'm not disabled, transgendered, or anything else. Just a socially awkward red-head who spent most of my elementary and middle school years either embarrassing myself or wishing I wasn't so goddamned awkward.

In and after high-school, that all changed. I had a circle of friends during this time, something I had never had before. Something I still cherish.

> Could be that people with [insert unusual trait here] are naturally drawn to computers for similar reasons, be they autistic, transgendered, disabled, or just plain weird.

This seems reasonable.

But why the lack of biologically-born women? Surely they can be weird, too.

I can't back the statement right now and do not even remember where I read it, but I do remember reading that autism spectrum women (who are rarer than autism spectrum males) tend to be drawn to fantasy setting and express themselves in fan fiction far more often. It would be interested to see the gender breakdown in fan fiction and related interests.

Maybe it's more like the weirder people are pushed away from things they find awkward. They're pushed to the easiest alternative. Social cues come into play; males are cued that technology is acceptable for them, females are cued that it isn't. More transgendered people than cisgendered people may not identify with those gender-based social cues, and disregard them.

What are those social cues? I don't know, in general. In my case, my father used the computer much more than my mother did. He built and maintained it. "Computer people" in the late 80s and early 90s were almost all male. My grandfather taught me, but not my sister, about electronics and soldering. My sister certainly played computer and video games, but not nearly as much as me or my brother.

Intuitively i'd guess it's something to do with the way children are 'socialised'.

It seems very common for children living as boys to immerse themselves in video games and computers if they're dealing with social isolation or anxiety/depression. It's almost actively encouraged for them to do so — their parents and teachers treat it as normal, most of their male class mates dabble in it, and when i was growing up in the '90s at least video games and computers were depicted almost exclusively as the realm of boys. For trans people in particular i imagine the (semi-)anonymous community aspect also offers some degree of freedom of expression/identity that they often don't have in real life.

Children living as girls are not encouraged to get into games and computers to anywhere near the same degree, and for historical reasons they don't really have anyone to look to as an example or role model in that space.

I've noticed that all of the trans women i've heard of who had supportive parents and were able to start living as girls early on aren't really interested in games or computers. Admittedly, it's a very very small sample size filtered through the lens of what the mass media consider interesting — Jazz Jennings, that girl from Germany, and a few others — but it's a pattern i've seen anyway.

I didn't notice that the subject was trans-gender until I read your comment. It's good that the article doesn't highlight the fact: as soon as someone is presented as transgender, this trait becomes their principal trait, even if they have other interesting accomplishments.

> as soon as someone is presented as transgender, this trait becomes their principal trait

I don't feel this way at all.

Okay, I don't feel this way either. Unfortunately, most of the world is not as liberal as the community on hacker news, and as soon as you mention 'gay' or 'transgender', the discussion turns to gender / sexual orientation rather than the original topic at hand. The article sidesteps this issue by not mentioning it until much later, that is all.

I don't think that's true of all trans people, but - anecdotally, as with many comments I make on here - several trans people I've met have been the type where being trans is their entire identity, as in it's the only real defining characteristic about them that they show. Obviously the majority are likely not like this, but those few who are seem to be the vocal ones as well.

I would guess that communities of introverts are more likely to commit acts that are deemed socially unacceptable, or at least socially disparaging. Could it just be easier to express yourself in such a community?

If you check the Filfre.net series of articles, you will find that a number of people involved in early game development would change gender later in life.

On a different note, manga and anime seems to more often have protagonists of diffuse gender by western norms.

In tech in general. The thing that seems most particular about games is the preference for pseudonyms, usually picked from game lore. There was an interesting talk during Pycon 2014 about being transgender in tech:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R6FXtZl154

A similar observation on my part that corroborates this: as I started reading the piece, saw that the hacker being interviewed (Myria) was described as female, my immediate intuition (while knowing no other details about the person) was that she was rather more likely to be transgender than biologically-born female.

Similar to you, I have little provable intuition as to why this correlation apparently exists, though.

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