Over at The Wonderful World of Mr C my colleague Ian Corns keeps track of gaming technologies. He’s into PS3s, Wiis and stuff like that – serious business, not childish toys these days.

He’s written a great piece around this abridged video of the Sony GDC 2007 Keynote which shows a fully dynamic gaming environment, with a realistic physics engine. Let’s unpack that a bit… In most games objects are coded in some kind of programming language and run directly in code – they can only be altered or maintained by altering the game’s source and re-compiling. In this model from Sony the objects are declared by anyone and run within the game – so anyone can create games using this model. Ian’s piece is here: What Web2.0 Developer Networks Should Be…

Now, Ian talks about the democratisation of development, and I totally agree with him on that trend. I’ve been watching Teqlo which allows visual design of web-based applications that plug together web services. Coghead are on a similar track and there are others. This is a trend that started a while ago, and there has been much interest in it from inside Enterprise with lots of people looking at Biztalk.

So Ian and I agree on the trend, but I’m not sure we agree on where it leads to. Ian sees the world like this:

“But I want to build my own mash-ups and applications using library-relevant web services – I’ve got loads of ideas”, I shout. “No”, says Mr Developer, “you can’t. Only we’re allowed to do that because we have ‘special knowledge’”.

I don’t, most developers I know (but at Talis we only hire great developers, so not reflective of the industry, perhaps would say

“sure, come on in, here’s the editor, here’s the compiler, here’s some examples to get you started”

Certainly I would, and have, and my colleagues have too. So we disagree, I think, on the barriers to entry. I think another indication of this is here:

It passes my favourite validation criteria for technology – namely “Could my Mum do it?” Within this game, my Mum can become as good a developer as anyone else because ALL developer complexity has been hidden.

Now, I have to say that I don’t know Ian’s mum. I’m sure she’s a really nice lady, smart too. But I’d love to see that experiment – Ian’s mum trying to write a game using these tools. Without wishing to disrespect Ian’s mum; I bet it would suck. For that matter, if my mum tried to write a game with these tools it would suck too, and she’s a professional sysadmin (no, I’m not joking, my mum builds servers).

The reason is that these tools may hide the complexity of a language, of “code”, but for good developers this is not the hard bit; writing the code is the easy bit. The hard bit is understanding the problem and devising a great solution. Now, as a hardened game player Ian has a substantial level of deviousness, alternative thinking, surreal thinking – the kind of thinking that leads to great solutions. I’d like to see the game he builds.