Don’t mourn the web, bring it back to life
As a kid I learned python because I wanted to make videogames with the now long defunct Blender Game Engine.
This was between 2008 and 2012 and it was very fun. Allow me to reminisce for a while.
At the time, when I wasn’t at school, chances were I would be on the computer with at least one tab open on the Blender Brasil forum, dedicated to (Portuguese-speaking) people interested in computer graphics with free software. This was one of those PHP forums where you could add some markup with square brackets and emoticons and so on. We had about 5000 users, so that rarely 2 minutes passed without a new post or reply. But it was also a small enough place that a few mods could easily keep up with spam and misbehavior. There was a forum culture; when you got in, people acted a certain way, and you followed them.
People shared their cool 3D models, renders, animations, game prototypes and tutorials. They asked for help, artistic and technical. They formed little teams to do projects together. Most were beginners, many were literal kids (like myself). There was no “content”, people just did things.
We would chat on IRC. I made friends. I loved this; it was much easier to make friends on the internet than at school. We made silly joke IRC bots, little 2D and 3D games. I poked at Blender’s source code, others preferred using it. Some people really got better as time passed, and they were admired for the quality of their modelling, the grace of their animations, their lighting, their hand-drawn textures and material models, the photorealistic images they sometimes produced. I still remember quite a few usernames, but never met any of them.
Trying to learn computer graphics in that forum put me on a path to lots of creativity. I became fascinated with many topics and that would eventually lead to my carreer choices. I’m not saying I learned a bunch of stuff, or that it made me more intelligent or productive: I am saying I became aware of many things I would otherwise not know, tried my hand at them, dipped the toes of my mind in the Mysteries, and I was much better off for it. It doesn’t matter how competent I got in, say, programming through this exploration (in reality, not much). What matters is that I got myself out there and saw with my own eyes how big the world was.
Unfortunately, in today’s web there I do not see a lot of world travel. Well, there is travel, but it’s very little web hitchhiking, and very much web tourism. It’s incredible how streamlined the whole thing has gotten; as long, of course, as you wish “consuming content” to be the central goal. I am not the first to see this and lament it.
One can wonder how much of this sentiment is justified. After all, the world is still out there ready to be seen, even if we all flock to the same queues in the same ready-made instagrammable spots of the same cities. The existence of the tourism industry does not prohibit you in principle to just go cross your country on a motorcycle; the existence of Big Tech does not, in principle, prohibit you from going out there in the infinite hyperspace of the web and just be free.
At this point I instictively reacted with: “reality is not so simple. What good is being free if you are alone? There is no Blender Brasil forum anymore, and there hasn’t been one for years. Where did all those people go? Where would I go if I were a kid trying to learn to make cool videogames and animations nowadays?” This is what my “everything sucks now” response would be, with no data to back it up.
Then I started actually looking.
A naive Google search for “how to make 3D games” (query written in Portuguese, Google geolocalized in Germany because I didn’t bother finding a way around that) shows up YouTube™ tutorials and Reddit™ discussions. I’ll ignore Reddit because all I’ve seen there isn’t actually from Portuguese speakers; the discussions are auto-translated, sparse, and are mostly boring question-answer style. YouTube is interesting; I clicked on the first 10 videos or so and the spirit of those old forums is alive in the comments. A few of those tutorials will try to sell you courses, but this isn’t new, I remember paid course offers in the old days. In any case, these are just honest-to-God commercial offerings, shown to people who directly went looking for the thing that’s being sold, in a non-privacy-invading, non-evil-manipulative way. I’m totally fine with it.
People look fascinated in the YouTube comments. Wow, game engines? Wow, I can make my own 3D stuff that moves around? Wow, I don’t even need to know this galaxy-brain programming stuff to start? Wow, it’s free? Wow, I can do it directly in Android? “Hey I’m gonna remake Dark Souls with 7 monsters, rain, fog, each mob will have skills, Call of Duty guns, and Minecraft shields!!!”, says one commenter. “It’s my first game”, they add. Love the spirit.
I am not happy with the fact that these discussions are happening in YouTube comments rather than a free community space. But you know what? They are happening. Inside of this Skinner box hell designed for maximum “engagement”, curious and creative people do nonetheless talk to each other and figure stuff out.
YouTube comments are fine, but what about an actual forum? Well, kids these days call them Discord® Servers© (I like how corporate can just decide what a whole generation thinks the word “server” means. Reminds me of when Sky, the TV broadcasting company, tried to sue those who used the word “sky” for copyright infringement.) It’s not hard to find a Discord Server for Portuguese-speaking beginners learning to make videogames. I entered one, and it has around 1300 users with 300 currently online. The chats I could see without making an account don’t seem super active, there are 5-day gaps of activity. But the forum does exist, and people can find out about each other, share demos, talk about pixel art, sound design, game mechanic ideas and so on. I am sure the visitors of this walled garden are too busy having fun together to see the walls.
To make what could be a long post shorter: the web isn’t dead, so don’t mourn it. If you have the technical knowledge, make free community spaces, teach people to put up their own servers. Resist tracking, resist corporate control, preach against the attention economy, go all in. But if you can’t do this, don’t despair, don’t imagine that the bad ending is inevitable.
Just get out of the tourist traps and go see this foreign country for what it is.