Manufacturing curiosity

I bought The Witcher 3 for PC 3 years ago as part of a Witcher bundle: 1, 2, 3 and all the expansions. I didn’t play any of the games for more than 1 hour. This past year I bought Witcher 3 again, like a fucking moron, for Nintendo Switch. $60 USD. I’ve played for 100 hours already. The sheer convenience of playing it on a console that boots up in 2 seconds, remembers exactly where you left off and with controllers that can be used akimbo so you don’t fuck up your wrists? Amazing. The experience is honestly amazing. Modern video game consoles have removed so much of the struggle that used to plague PC games - DirectX drivers, not enough RAM, outdated video card, you name it. I learned a lot of computer terminology from trying to get my PC games to work. The Nintendo Switch is a much better gameplay experience.

It’s also completely opaque. As much as computers suck (and they do, dear reader, computers are the worst) - in order to make things work sometimes, you can’t help but go into the guts and mess around and learn about all sorts of arcana you wouldn’t normally care about. Screen resolution, monitor refresh rate - playing PC games forced me to get curious about how computers work. I know nothing about my Nintendo Switch’s internals.

Computer games are naturally a big feeder into computer science programs. Many people think they’ll like working on games since they loved playing them so much - “I love animals, don’t butchers spend all their time with animals?”.

The core difference remains for me - modern technology is so usable and so convenient that there are few reasons to peek under the hood and get curious. The obvious advantage of this is that far more people can launch a website or a blog or a shop, the disadvantage might be that we don’t know as much about the architecture of the internet.

This is bad for two reasons - it kills curiosity and it hides the lack of security in many devices around us.

So how do we make people curious about this stuff again, useful again? Bret Victor does it best in his talk on Inventing on Principle. You have to make the next layer of toys that allow people to see what is truly possible with computers. You can generate universes inside of these things. You can build alternate models of all kinds and that is really, really cool! It’s also really, really hard. But I think we should try to expose that a bit more rather than just make people very happy customers. At least, that’s where my heart lies.