Reading 03: Game Hackers

 My first initial point that I thought was interesting was the phrase used right at the start "We'll figure two months... Programmers always lie"(page 230). I didn't know that this was a stereotype that ever was present surrounding programmers. I think the addition of this was good however, because it set the tone for how people like Ken started to view programmers and gave an interesting insight into how different Game Hackers were being treated as opposed to the other hackers that we have discussed before. The marketability of programming changing so drastically in just the space of a couple of years feels eerily similar to how the marketplace for programmers changed after generative AI started to influence corporations, but in a lot more different and indirect way, over a lot shorter time span. Another interesting thing that I noticed as well was the integration of fantasy and nerd culture intertwined with computer nerd culture with the game 'Adventure'. Game Hackers and the rise of modern-ish home computing led to the homogenization of nerd culture, where instead of computers being a completely different sect of nerdism, became one of the founding and core pillars alongside science fiction and fantasy. Sure, now nerd culture is extremely branching with a million different subcultures, but for the 70s-90s, before the modern internet and before nerd culture was normalized, computing and programming being so intertwined with nerd culture was a major shift. I think that nerds of this time were definitely treated a lot differently than today, as culture as a whole was far less accepting. There were no major nerd outlets for film, gaming, and television to the extent there are today. Star Wars drastically changed this, being really the first huge foray of nerd culture in popular culture. This style of in-group nerd culture made it really easy for programming and computers to be adopted in, as it itself already was in-group-y thanks to both hacker groups we have talked about already being centered around cliques and groups of people that banded together under the 'hacker' banner. The marketability of programming pulled computers and programming into the more business world and the corporate 'normal', which opposed what was happening to computer culture at the time. So what ended up happening it seems, was there were groups of people that were interested in computers from a business perspective, or a personal perspective. I think that this bleeds through even to today, as a lot of prospective computer science majors I have met joined the field because "you can make a lot of money" or "every business needs computer scientists" as opposed to why people such as myself joined computer science: "I like computers and programming". I think that the book did a good job of showing this dichotomy through stories of hackers that were on both sides of this, a lot better than the last section in my opinion. It felt a lot more cohesive, and I could really understand the direction of where the author wanted to take this book, and did.