Boredom

When did technology become boring? When did we stop being impressed by how new things could be made, chasing the impossible, and building a future we only read about in science fiction novels? When did we stop experiencing wonder at how well something was done, instead only moaning that it isn’t exactly to our preferences?

Finding Wonder

A friend got very exited recently telling me about a new game he has been playing (Sumerian Six). I remember this conversation because of the absolute technical delight he found in a seemingly simple aspect of the game.

The save and load times.

We take auto-save for granted in our editors these days. IDEs have it, word processors have it, browser based editors have it. When it is just text being written we think “of course that makes sense”. Ctrl-Z always goes back a certain amount, and has done so for decades at this point. So why is it that this brought him such joy?

Well, when applied to a video game with a large number of sprites and a massive world map, we expect the amount of “stuff” in memory to be pretty huge. We are used to disk IO being the bottleneck in these things (and that’s not wrong) because the buffer is too large, and so when you do save or load there are a fair amount of slow operations happening. All this is improved drastically by bringing solid state drives into the equation, but even so there is a noticeable delay compared to writing to memory.

So, here is a case of a small piece of technical excellence which really is worth writing about. How did they do it? I doubt they pointed an agent at it and said “make this fast”. I believe someone spent years building a knowledge of the exact type of systems in play, and has brought that experience to bear with a strong technical team and a brilliant animation studio. There is a lot that could be going on, and from a technical standpoint I am fascinated.

Is it all about the buffer size and writing to disk more frequently in the background? Is everything staying in memory longer? Or is there something equally clever with a ledger based system (or more accurately event-sourced system) which is only actually saving deltas, and relying on static assets (like backgrounds) not being significantly changed between saves?

Asking the right questions

If you look at that first section, you will see there are a bunch of options I have presented. A number of questions asked. None of them are boring, in fact from a technical level those are all things I would enjoy reading more about. In the context of a video game even more so, because really no one cares more about performance than gamers do.

So why are we not writing about these things? Why are we not asking “ooh, how do they do that cool thing?” Where are the questions which drove most of us into technology in the first place?

Sure, some of us “older” characters have to take on compliance and ethics and so on. That doesn’t remove the opportunity to be building cool stuff. It doesn’t take away from the fact that there are a large umber of deterministic systems which still inspire awe in us. In fact, how many of us have bothered to ask how auto-save in a text based editor works?

Do we know the tricks at play which mean tapping a key on the keyboard gives us a near instant letter on the screen? Do we know what causes chatter (a problem my keyboard has) and when to blame software vs when to blame hardware? Do we even care about the difference?

What are we looking for, as technologists? Where did the questions go? Where did the wonder go?

No such thing as bad press

When you are a multi-billion dollar industry, all you really need is your name in people’s mouths, and written on their screens. You need people to be regurgitating the same noise again and again both for and against you. As long as you stay in the public eye it does not matter how well you perform you will keep getting funded.

Let’s get into a tense and political sporting analogy. Everyone knows South Africa is at the top of the world rankings in men’s rugby and cricket. We’re also pretty well ranked in women’s cricket. Which is awesome. So why does so much public funding go to football? Bafana Bafana qualified for the FIFA world cup in 2026 which was the first time they appeared in a world cup since 2010, and we only played that year because we were hosting. The men’s and women’s hockey teams have been to the world cup multiple times, and do not get nearly the same level of support.

Now, arguments can be made about the global nature of the sport whatever whatever. My point is not “all sports should be funded”. My point is, because football is perceived as more popular and stirs up a bigger crowd in support, it gets the money. People can’t watch the hockey world cup unless they download the official app and pay for a fairly expensive “all games” subscription. Why? Well, local broadcasters don’t see the value in bidding for broadcast rights. Oh, they’ll broadcast the local school sport, but not the national team winning games on the world stage.

So, there is no such thing as bad press. The names which are in the news, the names which are showing up with medals, are the names which are getting sponsorships and are getting the funding to play sport at a professional level. The same is true of technology.

So what?

So I am bored of only seeing one kind of tech in my feeds. I am actually even more bored of seeing the rants about “how bad it is”. I want to be excited about something new and interesting again, not just complain about how the bots have taken out github for the fifth time this week.

I want to see how ledger based systems can transform the gaming experience. I want to see really exiting user experience improvements in websites, where people are doing cool stuff with data stores in browser memory. I want to see the cool stuff. I don’t care who wrote the code. I care about the outcome, and the algorithm, and the dreams you had to follow to make it real.

Technologists don’t seem to stick around in the field unless they are able to know they are actually doing the cool edgy stuff they started out with. So lets find those places, and bring something new to light. Let’s start innovating again.