my name is mwd

I’m the kind of person that thinks a computer isn’t complete unless it comes with a compiler, and that you’ve not used a computer until you’ve written some programs for it – that probably makes me a bit of a luddite these days I suspect.

It also means I’ve been disappointed with games consoles. I suspect the way that most young people today come in contact with computers is through games consoles, and they’re pretty much a read only medium – there’s no way for people to easily create their own content, and also importantly no way to share anything if they had created it. To me this is a bit of a barrier to convincing children to explore the potential of computer science, as there’s no easy access to be creative on the platform most of them use habitually.

However, Microsoft are taking steps to change this. First, for a while now, they’ve made a freely available development kit to let people write games for the XBox. Called XNA, it lets people write XBox games on their PC and download them to their own XBox. This is great stuff, and something I’ll have to find time to play with, but had the drawback that there was no way of sharing your latest creation with others out there easily. Part of the fun of creating something is sharing it either out of pride or desire for nerd glory.

Now Microsoft have addressed that issue too – people will be able to share their XNA games on the XBox Live Marketplace. This means anyone with an XBox 360 and an XBox live account can freely download home made games to their XBox over the Internet.

This is something of a first as far as I can tell for games consoles, and hopefully will encourage lots of new young developers to come up with exciting homebrew content. Sure, they’re unlikely to make games that look as rich as the big studios do, but as the Nintendo Wii has shown, people are starting to remember that just because a game isn’t the most pretty doesn’t mean it’s not exciting to play. I’m sure there’ll be some drivel out there too, but hopefully it’ll spur on the next generation of developers.