There are two schools of thought that pertain to the flow of information.
The dominant school of thought is that information flow should be strictly controlled. That copyright, trademark and the ownership of knowledge and information drives competition, incentivises innovation and leads to growth of the industry.
The other school of thought is that information should be allowed to flow unhindered, that all ideas should be free and freely distributable and that no one should be able to own information. This school proposes that “all ships rise with the tide” and that growth is a side effect of everyone working with open access to the infinitely renewable and always expanding resource of information out there.
Game developers historically tended to subscribe to the second school of thought.
Nearly 50 years ago, when computer gaming was born, gaming was a kind of closeted hobby, and the first computer gamers were in fact the first game developers; physics and engineering students in universities who hacked their school machines to play games of their own creation. This hacker mentality and DIY attitude became part of the core philosophy of early game development.
Long before games were distributed via Steam, years before Blu-ray, DVD, CD, or even floppy, game code was printed in specialty magazines and indie ’zines. Gamers would retype (and would usually need to debug) the magazine printouts of the code into their own computers to play a game – the line between gamer and developer could not have been more blurred.
As games grew in complexity and started to find their way into the pizza parlours and living rooms of the world, there arose a need to draw a line between gamer and game developer. Any dude with a quarter could play a game, but increasingly you needed a degree and access to some expensive hardware to actually make a game. But developers always seemed to find a way to leave the door open for gamers to participate in the making of games. From the earliest level editors like the Lode Runner editor, then later to the Wolfenstein level editor, the Doom engine, the Duke 3D tools, and eventually to today’s Unreal Engine, developers have consistently gone the extra mile to enable the free flow of ideas, information and creativity.
In parallel to all this growth, and in large part facilitating it, there came, paradoxically, and at times problematically, the game industry. I say ‘paradoxically’ because industries tend to subscribe to the first school of thought regarding the flow of information and the game industry is no exception.
The game industry brings with it economies of scale that allow exploration and development of new technologies and designs simply not possible at smaller scales. It also brings a broad market reach that can bring games to thousands of times more players than could otherwise be reached normally. In exchange for the advantages industry provides, it needs to protect its information and intellectual property. This leads us to a conflict between what game developers are and what the game industry is.
But I think that it’s a healthy conflict; one that keeps us all honest, and that, properly respected, makes us all stronger. I believe there is both good and bad in the free flow of information. I believe rather strongly in knowledge sharing, and the open communication of best practices through the proper forums of industry conferences such as GDC, or through university partnerships. I believe in the totally unhindered flow of theoretical information. On the contrary, I do not believe in sharing code or data that belongs to the ‘corporation’.
At the same time, along with these right and wrong interpretations of the free flow of information, I also think that there are right and wrong interpretations of the protection of information. I believe in NDAs and other protectionist clauses in contracts as far as they protect ‘hard’ intellectual property such as code or data, but I don’t think that these clauses should be extensible to protect ideas, theory, or even the sharing (within the proper forums) of soft concepts, such as best practices, that potentially improve the lives of our workers and creators.
In the end, while the hacker ethic of game developers seems potentially to be at odds with the responsibility that corporations have to their shareholders, I think that this isn’t often the case. As long as we have a nearly infinite design space for people to explore, there’s no reason for either side to attempt to wrestle control of information flow from the other side. While our friends in the microchip manufacturing industry and our other friends in the disc manufacturing industry may constantly be concerned with the hard physical limits on the edge of their design spaces, we have a long way to go before these sorts of external pressures could drive a wedge between us.