Comment by datakan
1 month ago
My son told me yesterday he wants to program video games for a living. He's 13. He's looking at how it used to be done and seeing the pride people had in doing it. He hasn't seen how it is now.
Not sure I have the heart to tell him how terrible the industry has become. Feels like telling a kid 30 years ago that being an astronaut is pointless because they no longer go to the moon.
IDK man it’s a golden era for one-man indie games right now (I just finished Endacopia) and that can only increase with AI assistance. I wouldn’t be too cynical about it
That also makes it a more difficult to make it a career than ever. There's simply too many games releasing. Steam is absolutely FLOODED with new games releasing, and it's very hard to stand out.
https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/
I agree. I open Steam sometimes and I'm met with a conveyor of games that look good enough for me to buy, but I can play a few of them at most before all of them are replaced with a new batch next month.
There's nothing new under the sun. The quality of your ideas and execution will still matter in this flood, as it always has been.
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I've been a long-time indie gamer and the appeal of older games has increased significantly for me since AI. Nearly an endless supply of top-notch human-crafted classic video games exist, virtually all for free or very cheap. I understand not everyone has the same taste as me but if they did I'd be surprised of there still was a modern gaming industry at all.
Absolutely, I'm a follower of a niche, local sport with a relatively small support base.
It never really made economic sense for a game studio to make video games for it.
Now there are indie developers creating extremely fun and truly impressive games of that sport with the help of AI.
Could you share examples?
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You may be right, I really don't know. I can't control the ocean, all I can do is learn to surf. I use the tools, bring home the check and go about my life. I just feel terrible for the people following after me who wont get to experience what I did. Maybe it's for the best, maybe not. Time will ultimately tell I suppose.
I have been surfing the wave since the 80s and all I can say is as cool as things have been through all of micro-computing history, I have no desire to return to the brutal tooling we had back then. And while the LLM-wave is more of a step function than linear growth like before, it's still a continuation of this which has been going on since I first touched a 6502: I can, with the newer tools, do more and get more done, and it lets me move further up the decision making matrix.
That does mean there is/will-be a deluge of slop and uninteresting "stuff" out there, and the problem now becomes producing things which are capable of standing out from the crowd. Something I'm not super good at.
But I see no point in valorizing the old tools and ways of doing things. Identify with the product, and the end goal. Not the tools used to get there.
Maybe there’s a narrow window to make hay right now, but that has to be closing fast for the same reasons.
I wouldn’t be giving kids any career advice around software development of any kind, myself. Now seems like the worst time in my life to be making long term projections on the subject.
I hold the opinion that learning about tech is important, especially as more and more of our world revolves around software.
Biased of course, but I'd keep betting on software over other fields when it comes to career options.
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Maybe it's a golden era for making one-man indie games, but not for playing and selling those games.
Ehhhhhh. Its a golden era for one-man indie games that are successful.
But this is deceptive. Per game delivered one man games were likely far far more successful in the past. Simply because there were very few of them in a much smaller market.
There are countless indie games to day and only the best of the best really get any views. It is insanely hard to stand out in that market.
The games industry is terrible. But he's still a kid and can learn making games for the sake of making games. I suggest to look at https://ludumdare.com/ and other game jams. That's a good way to get experience and have fun in the process.
I was the same at that age (decades ago, but still). And I'm kind of glad I didn't go down that path, seeing friends and colleagues who did. There's a (I think) Folding Ideas video where he's talking to some 13-yo Roblox developer who already has that jaded veteran kind of vibe to them. Which might be the most salient visual. The thing is separating the consuming experience from the creating experience, but also recognizing the validity and importance of both. It's obvious but hard to really internalize.
A good parallel I've discovered as an adult is wine. I love it, and collect it, and can talk at length about terroir, techniques, etc. About ten years ago I wanted to get hands-on experience, and thru a friend was able to intern at a local winery during harvest.
That was one of the most intense months of my life, and I was in physical pain for months afterwards, even as a relatively fit person. So much of that elegant, philosophical final product is manual labor, lifting lots of heavy shit, and endless repetitive motion. It was fun, but it was also brutal.
It left me with even more respect for the people who dedicate their lives to it. But also the realization that I'm much more comfortable being on the other end of it. And that's not only ok but absolutely essential, because the producers need people to buy (and maybe wax philosophical) about their product.
So yeah, by all means give it a shot. But also I think it's important to communicate that there are many valid and satisfying ways to engage with something. Consumer/maker isn't a binary.
As someone who has worked in both the game industry and the film industry - tell your son this:
When you are passionate about your work - it comes at a serious price. We live in capitalism and so everything has its cost. Passion in the workplace is taken-advantage of by the corporation. Sure, maybe there are a few places. Maybe more at the beginning of the industry. But by and large you and your skills will be treated very poorly. Because you really want to be there. And so they can get away with it. Paid less, treated less, considered less.
It's the same dynamic at play with teachers, who also feel passionate about their work. Probably every profitable field that has passion.
I don't say this to dissuade your son. But he should know what he's getting himself into. What the real price is. And what we need to fix.
The real trick (if you can pull it off) is to cultivate a passion for something most people aren't that interested in, but where there's plenty of demand. I wanted to make games growing up, as I'm sure many of us here did. It's actually how I got into programming in the first place: I want to make games, oh here's this book on BASIC that came with the computer, maybe that will tell me how. Somewhere along the way I managed to transform that into a broader passion for high-performance low-level programming not necessarily in games, and that has ended up being a great career. There isn't a great mass of people trying to get into the non-game side of this, so I get the benefit of personal passion without the downsides that come from competing with a million other passionate people.
If I had a kid into computers, I'd probably go with the "I want to make video games" sentiment for now, since it's a great hook for many broadly applicable skills, but be on the lookout for interesting non-games things that might catch their eye.
To be fair - I think the world is in such flux right now it's kinda impossible to predict what is a good path forward. I have no idea what to tell my kid.
But yes, I think many of us started with that book on BASIC making little programs for the joy of it. And it leads you all sorts of places.
"Follow your bliss" as they say.
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What was it like to work in the film industry, presumably as a software developer? I've heard lots of anecdotes about the games industry, but nothing whatsoever about working on a film.
Honestly - and maybe it's because it's had longer to mature - the film industry is better than the game industry. Before computers, films already needed artists to create brilliant stuff - and programming for passion is very much like art, I think.
Still, not a great place to be. Long brutal hours with insane deadlines, and a corporate structure that will try to bleed you dry. But they do have more recognition of the passion aspect.
That's kinda what I feel like telling him. He has a lot of passion and he's a very smart kid. I don't want to crush that, I want to nurture it. I think being real about things is important though and he has a lot of years still to ultimately decide.
I think you're doing right by giving him AI. But get him a coding harness - that's where the real traction is right now. Claude Code or Codex.
I say this because - the joy of making games is mostly in the design. The imagination it takes to create a new world. I use AIs to create these worlds for me, from MY imagination, and they are extremely useful for that.
One lesson that could be applicable, is that your passion doesn't necessarily have to be your "job". You can perform music on the weekends, or be an active participant in your local indie dev gamer community while having a totally boring corporate job. I've seen a lot of people burned by trying to make their passion their actual career.
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Don't sweat it. Everyone wants to write games at that age. I wanted to write games at 13, I was taking part in an open source game project at 15. Kid's interests in what kind of things they want to make do widen over time.
This is what I keep saying to my youngest, who wants to do games. Go to any bank or insurance company or web agency or to a FAANG company etc and you find rooms full of people who got into programming because they wanted to write games. And then realized what a trap that is and how much more money they could get out of just doing the same programming work but for far more "boring" ends.
Same as working for a non-profit on "meaningful" work. The meaning part starts to wear thin as you see the people around you slaying themselves for it and getting no adequate compensation.
There's a reason garbage collectors get paid so well.
You're right.
Side note, you mention the travails of capitalism in all this. I've been thinking that maybe that's what we get out of this. Maybe we leave it behind over the next couple years.
I have ironically been joking to my friends about "FALSA!" or "Fully Automated Luxury Space Anarchism" a la "The Culture." I'm optimistic enough to think I might get a chance to live in it (though I'm probably more inclined to live in the Elench).
If you haven’t already… show him how to use codex or claude or whatever. And let him start having fun and making games.
I got him a ChatGPT account with parental controls on it. I'm just hoping he uses it as a tool and not a crutch.
> I'm just hoping he uses it as a tool and not a crutch.
That's not enough given how much adults are struggling with this.
Best time to be a game programmer was probably the 80s or 90s, when you could make games in your bedroom and they became a hit.
Either then or today, when you can do the same thing and sell them through steam. Today you’ve got more competition but it’s easier to distribute.
You are looking at this all wrong. Give him the tools now and watch him be a better game dev today than a professional engineer from 4 years ago. He can work on his dreams as of this exact moment.
Tell him to run now. Time to become a plumber at least for a bit.
Only studios that have had a big mouth about using AI are the big ones. Indie studios are eating the industry and most of them are not bullish on AI for replacing the craft, but for optimizing and automating the mundane.
My son is 12, he doesn't care, I've told him how LLMs work, he's used claude, he's not convinced that AI changes things that much and frankly, so am I.
The work was always to build, thoughtfully, carefully, with vision, and ingenuity. That hasn't gone away.
> He's looking at how it used to be done
I mean, you're probably thinking 30 years ago; not any time recent. Indy devs are still a thing though.