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It's still seen as a waste of time, I think. Just has finally been accepted as normal. And while you may have been firing up hex editors, that probably wasn't the norm.

YOu are right, though, that the computer games of the nineties offered a lot more hackability than iPhone apps. ZZT was an introduction to OOP for many kids, Red Alert had rules.ini that defined the stats for each unit, and Duke3D had configuration files in C. Mods and "Total Conversions" were a things. That ecosystem isn't just unavailable in mobile games, but would probably be hated by many companies who want full control over their product.

So two things we should do: write more moddable games, include defaults that don't assume we're all male (or white, for that matter.

The "hackability" (and decrease thereof) isn't something exclusive to games - just look at what happened to the UIs of popular programs like browers, for example. Everything is becoming hidden away and more difficult to configure.

In contrast to the many menus and dialogs we had before that encouraged users to explore and customise, it seems that apps now are far more opaque to the point that many users don't even realise some things are options that can be changed.

That ecosystem isn't just unavailable in mobile games, but would probably be hated by many companies who want full control over their product

Perhaps it's a bit of a stretch, but I think the whole "war on general-purpose computing" has played some part in this too.

The latest versions of firefox are a painful reminder.

Then get the UI you want. That's possible in Firefox, as opposed to Chrome, for example.

Yes but why are they doing it in the first place? When the whole point of firefox is its customizability and 'non-proprietary' nature over chrome. I don't understand.

I got into programming a decade ago with Quake 2 engine forks and Neverwinter Nights private servers. You would never have avenues into that kind of thing from the ios platform at all. It is very much like how anyone from the Windows GUI generation never touched a terminal so they do not even know what a program / file / etc really is to begin with.

I don't know about that. I grew up on classic Mac OS with nary a command line in sight, and I found my way under the skin just fine. I was building compilers and writing device drivers before I ever learned how shell scripting worked. I think people who want to get inside will generally figure out how; the information is all out there for the asking. My pet theory is that there are just as many people interested in the inner workings as ever, but that we're a much smaller proportion of the total computer-using population now, and so we have a much smaller influence on the culture around computers and networks than we used to.

Except getting into Windows isn't a thing, even today, and even for all but the most professional engineers behind huge companies with Microsofts ear. Literally the limit of Windows is registry editing and trying to reverse engineer the horrible contents of some file in system32. There are no guts to see, no knobs to tweak, because its one massive black box. Earlier OSes, even Mac OS, has to be much more open because resources were much more limited and you could not obscure the implementation behind the black box without degrading the experience too much. More performance let MS get away with that, and if not for modable game engines there would have been nothing in my childhood to tinker with.

It's not the GUI per se -- I'd say that a classic smalltalk-80 system (or a pc set to boot into Pharo) would be way more "hackable" than even a standard GNU/Linux install (you can look at/change the whole window system, blitter etc while it is running).

One could make a solid argument that knowing what a file/program "really is" is entirely redundant: it's all von neuman architecture after all: why make the distinction?

That said, I absolutely agree on your sentiment about the ios platform being way too locked down. Most annoyingly, it's entirely arbitrary: it could very well ship with something along the lines of hypercard/applescript or something better out of the box.

I don't think the assumption is that all the users are male... it seems to me a lot of the assumption is that "girls are more likely to pay for a character change than boys" which may or may not be correct, without actual data.

That said, I feel that most (not all) apps with in-game purchases are pretty sleazy.

Interestingly in many games of the 90s...

- there were both genders more often (in, fact, i can name very few of the games I played that were male only... yeah DukeNukem for ex. I know a couple female only games, tho)

- when different genders were proposed it was OF COURSE for free. Now u gotta pay because u like a red hat better or what not.

Oh, that kind of thing still exists. Took me all of two seconds to find it:

http://www.androidgamehacks.net/forums/

And just like hacking with Game Genie was unusual back then, jailbreaking devices, hacking .apk files and hand-editing save games isn't for everybody either. But all of that definitely still exists, and is far more accessible than ever.

Not the same.

The GameGenie/GameShark/ActionReplay scene was much more accessible than hacking .apk files and jailbreaking mobile devices. I was messing with those devices even before I decided on a CS major. And it was as simple as just having one stray thought "What happens if I change this number?" In contrast, you don't just decide "What happens if I open this apk file up and change such and such?" How many people even know that the apk files are just zip files to start with? Then you get into decompile the files or hex-editor or whatever... but none of that is accessible as just randomly entering a different number in the GameGenie interface that's presented to you immediately.

There's hope though - Minecraft seems to be immensely popular with children, and for a good part because it's so hackable and moddable.

Definitely. Minecraft and modding it are so popular that I've had a hard time finding an up to date guide for adults who want to make Minecraft mods - Google searches on the topic are filled with pages of sites oriented towards helping teens learn Java.

This is a prevalent meme on Hacker News but it's nothing more than the tech version of Old Man Yells At Cloud.

This old man seems to be unable to find the built in file explorer in iDevices with which to be able to find the savegame location and edit the number of coins he has.

Enlighten me, youngster how is that accomplished without breaking the warranty of the device?

Here you go: http://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer/ You need a PC for that, though. If you want to stay on the phone, or accomplish more powerful things, you need to jailbreak. This theoretically voids the warranty, but kids don't usually care about that; on the other hand, consider that many of them would be using dedicated game consoles (home or portable) for equivalent purposes back then, and those typically required buying (i.e. for a child, convincing one's parent to buy) a physical cheating device, whereas jailbreaks are free downloads.

I think the prominent divide between console and casual gaming hides the fact that iDevices behave much more like the consoles of yore (Cart and early CD based systems), which were, to the vast majority of kids playing them, pure black boxes of tech. My tinkering began with Apple II/Mac/PC games.

Perhaps the 'hacking' occurring nowadays is just different. A lot of young people I know play Minecraft, for example, and a large subset of them even get into complicated redstone logic circuits and whatnot, or modding.

When I look at my childhood, the vast majority of my peers had consoles and didn't 'hack' them at all. It was mostly the few 'pc gamers' that got into this. I don't think it's so different nowadays.

I totally agree. People are arguing that video games going mainstream is making LESS people interested in tech? Bizarroland.

Kids today are going to be more likely to get into tech, and it's going to be far far easier for them to do it. We don't need to get nostalgic for how much more "authentic" it was back in the day when the tools sucked a lot more.

(the GameShark comparison may be valid - but in my experience, a GameShark was just a thing you bought to cheat in a game. None of my friends who got them got into learning about programming because of it)

plenty of games have tremendous educational value, and I'm sure every pro-gaming argument you ever thought of which didn't involve hacking still remains as valid as ever.

tetris teaches geometry, word games teach vocabulary, strategy games teach strategy - I don't even understand how you got upvoted. you kind of just sound like the guy who hates his favorite band because they got popular.

kids can get so much more attention from figuring out a hack today than ever before. when I figured out a hack as a kid, the best-case scenario would be that my nerdy friends were the only ones who noticed. but a decade ago, having the best CSS hack on MySpace was something everybody in school would know about. today, being able to hack your phone is one of the coolest things a kid could ever brag about.

software is eating the world, so competence with computers is becoming indistinguishable from competence, period. the fact that iOS does not provide you with a shell account can't change that fundamental fact.

this popular iOS game was co-developed by a five-year-old girl and her father:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sissy%27s_Magical_Ponycorn_Adve...

I think you need to let the kids walk on your lawn a little, dude.

Tetris teaches geometry? Bit of a stretch there. It may use geometry but it's not teaching anything I ever learned in geometry. Wife loves Tetris and she can't geometry for nothin'

"Even computer games that were not developed with the explicit intent to provide such training, such as Block Out and several versions of Tetris, have been found to contribute to enhancing spatial skills."

http://web.jhu.edu/cty/STBguide.pdf

I can see how he was confused by the conflation of "teaches geometry" and "improves spatial skills" (though I can of course see how you could say the former and mean the latter).

well, yeah. I tend to check Hacker News in the morning, while I'm making my espresso, and my precision sometimes suffers accordingly.

sorry, I'd probably get a lot more upvotes if that weren't the case.

Where have they been found? This doesn't prove your claim that Tetris teaches geometry, or anything really, there's no data. I'm sure it does have some affect though, like playing a lot of Tetris improves your ability to play Tetris. :)

Unrelated, I notice the Tetris effect [1] strongly when I play RTS games too long. I still see the game when I go to bed, and I get weird urges to perform the actions of the game when I'm not playing.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect

I don't think it's quite as bad as you make out.

Like you, playing video games from a young age was the entry point for me into computing, but (partly also due to every adult saying they were a waste of time) I didn't realise until much later (17-18) that I could take that interest and make it in to a fulfilling career.

Despite the walled gardens, tools are still out there for people who want to make new or hack existing games, and people who want to do that will find a way.

They will have a curiosity about how things work that won't be quelled until they figure it out, and the process of figuring it out will be half the fun plus a large chunk of the learning.

It's interesting. When I first started using computers it was to play games, and in those days the only way to play those games was to either type up the BASIC code by hand, or learn the incantations to load the programs from disk or tape. In either case, you needed to (rote) learn some technical skills to have a bit of fun.

In retrospect, I see I was lucky enough to come into computing at exactly the right time. When I was young I was capable of understanding (practically) my entire computer system, because those systems were so simple. As the complexity increased, so did the depth of my understanding. Today, I understand most of what my computer does (the most important parts, at least).

What a tough road it must be for a newcomer to cope with all this complexity, the very complexity I have literally spent my whole life learning.

When I was a kid, hacking was a means to an end. If I wanted to play a game on my Commodore 64 or an Apple ][, I had to learn some basic skills on the computer, not tap an icon. Before I had a disk drive, I typed BASIC programs into the C64 from Compute Gazette, and learned programming via osmosis. If I got stuck in a game, the world wide web and gamefaqs didn't exist yet, so I figured out how to hack the savegame file.

I'm not a natural hacker. If I was a kid now, I'd just play games on an iPad and effectively learn nothing because there's no friction. This isn't a slam on the ipad or misplaced nostalgia, just a recognition that sometimes you are forced to learn things out of necessity, and if you're born into plenty, you never are forced to grow. On the other hand, for anybody who's a born tinkerer, the fact that iPads are locked down and super easy to use is irrelevant because you have a thousand other cheap hackable devices like Raspberry Pis or Arduino. For someone who's not a born tinkerer though, they may never pick up a hackable device, and will miss some opportunities for growth.

Check out the LittleBigPlanet series... it's got a modding system that would have blown your mind as a child. I'm an adult and a programer and it still blows my mind. It's not just an incredibly powerful modding system, but that's an intended part of the game—there are levels, and tutorials with real voice acting, teaching you how to use it; and an easy to use online system for sharing your levels, or viewing the levels other people have made.

I hear ya. But there's probably still something different that these kids will get out of their particular version of the experience.

Maybe it'll be battling Minecraft plugins and building one on their own (after all, this is still the #1 game among children from what I understand). It might be developing an instinct for great UX and media execution (games like Candy Crush for instance).

Only hindsight will tell, but I don't think it'll be entirely for naught.

Those two things are pretty tightly related (though of course, that doesn't make it correct at all). It's a lot easier for people to vilify something that's relatively uncommon (gaming back then) vs something that's ubiquitous. People en masse are stupid and lazy, and being uncommon is an easy (albeit idiotic) heuristic for "not an excusable use of time".

There's a good number of youtube videos where young kids give tutorials on modding Minecraft. Not quiet as raw, but certainly a similar gateway.

I didn't get into programming until college, but I remember spending hours creating my own winamp skin as a teen.

The people like you grew up and had kids, and every parent wants their kid to have what they couldn't have.

Yeah, I'm a bit bitter about it.

Why? You won.

Perhaps because he would like future generations to be able to win also, rather than having the game taken away.