The Democratization of Gaming

On June 4th, my own General Assembly will be co-producing its first conference: the Mobile Gaming Summit. The fairly literal title of the event belies a deeper meaning -- a meaning that speaks to me as well as to General Assembly's mission. In many ways, the Summit should really be called "The Democratization of Gaming Summit", or more broadly, "the re-democratization of application development". I started programming in middle school, building games on my TI-83 calculator while bored in class. Word of mouth was the only way to share applications -- typically games -- and doing so required connecting the two calculators with a special cable. It was hardly a scalable distribution channel, and I can only imagine where Texas Instruments would be today if they had built a robust app store and marketed it to bored hackers in junior high. While Objective C is certainly more challenging than the BASIC* we all learned for the TI-83, the relative openness of the Apple and Android app stores nonetheless represent a remarkable democratization of game development.

Unfortunately, I don't believe there is any secular force ensuring that this trend has to continue. The creation of popular native PC apps fell out of popular reach over a decade ago and hasn't come back. There are a number of reasons for this, but ultimately, the continued democratization of mobile platforms must be in the hands of the platforms' minders -- Apple, Google and to an increasing extent, Microsoft -- to ensure. While I hear a lot of complaining about Apple's strict and often Byzantine app store rules, I think the biggest threats to the democratization of app development come not from top-down restrictions and regulation, but from the sneaky and un-competitive practices of established studios.

To give a specific example, it is remarkably easy for well-capitalized developers -- be they established studios or spammers -- can buy good market positioning by purchasing app downloads. To keep competition fair and developers honest, those who control the platforms must put some limits on these practices.

For the rest of us, it's all about education. Apple and Google will do whatever they'll do, but it's on us to make sure that we as developers know the best practices and methodologies of working within the system. That's what the Summit -- and General Assembly's educational offerings -- are all about. Some of the most creative, interesting and transformative products are created when regular people are given the tools to create and the avenues to distribute and monetize those creations. The more regular people know how best to work the system, the cooler stuff we'll be able to create.

And that's why I'm thrilled to be working with the Mobile Gaming Summit. I hope many of you can join us there.

* You also could build TI apps in Assembly, but c'mon.