Did gaming ruin software?
Posted Tuesday, January 16th 2007
While sharing a few beers with a friend yesterday, we started talking how gaming has influenced the development of home, end-user hardware. It’s really not a hard idea to grasp - if computers were only used at home for text processing, office tasks, surfing, and/or similar things, then there is really no need for uber-fast processors, gigabytes of ram and gigs upon gigs (if not terabytes) of hard drive space. And for the sake of argument, let’s assume that image & video processing, 3D and so on, are only to be seen as work-related tasks, and thus not really falling into the home-user category of uses for a personal computer.
And it’s true - I had a machine set up for my father to surf at home (I’m not letting him anywhere near my box), and it’s downright ancient. A 400 mhz Celeron with 128 megabytes of ram. But I run Windows 98SE on it, and nicely cleaned up, it runs Firefox like a dream, and that’s all my father needs. It runs great, and he just surfs the net, and that’s about it. He’s happy, and I’m happy too, because he’s not toching my box.
Anyway, after talking about this for a few minutes yesterday, my friend came up with the theory that gamers have ruined software. One might ask how is that, and again, it’s actually quite simple to grasp. Because gaming has driven the improvement of hardware so much and so fast over the past 15 or so years, all of us have formidable supercomputers at home - and let’s not kid ourselves, the amount of processing power that our machines have is amazing. So, because we have so much power to run pretty much anything we can find, developers have become a bit more lax in their programming habits.
In “the old days”, when memory was quite limited, developers had to be creative in the ways that they write code - so that their code will be as efficient as possible and require as little memory as possible. But nowadays, since they know that the end users have (arguably) fast machines, there is no need to be as strict. And although this might seem a bit too far out there at first, it does stand to some reason. Ofcourse, one must never forget that a substantial number of existing developers out there write good, clean, efficient code, but a substantial amount do not - and the philosophy that “we don’t care about the extra variable, or the inefficient loop, because the machines are fast anyway” is completely solid and valid, and almost every developer has heard it, or said it, at least once.
So, it’s actually quite straightforward to link the two theories together, and in a way, blame gaming for the “decline”, or possibly worded in another way - the reduction of quality of end-user software. Although I personally might not agree with it outright, because there are a number of other influences that have influenced software development in one way or another, but it does merit some though.
Who knows, if PC gaming had not become so important, maybe Gates’ statement about 640k being enough for everyone, might have actually been true.
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As some of you might now, I got a job some two months ago. So, the time has come for my first business trip - and my office is sending me to sunny Moscow! I can’t wait to frolic on the beaches and enjoy the warm weather!
