The third generation of hackers that followed the "True Hackers" and the "Hardware Hackers" marked a shift from the curiosity and novelty that drove the true hackers, and the monetary gain from hardware that drove the hardware hackers. Instead, the new generation of hackers learned the programming on these existing computers and were concerned with working as much as possible for their own monetary gains, goals that eventually led to the boom of the gaming industry on these computers. Hence the term for these hackers became "Game Hackers".
Contrary to the catchy title of this post, I would not categorize myself as a gamer, but in reading the third part of Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, I definitely could understand where the attraction to games as a "magic" of what the computer could do came from. As Levy described Ken Williams' wife, Roberta, and her obsession with the games she was playing, I remembered the early days of the home computer my family had, and how entranced my sisters and I would get by simple online games. So it is easy for me to see then, how the early days of computing quickly became a place for gaming to begin to flourish.
I liked in the first part of this reading how you can see Roberta begin to become a hacker, not from pure curiosity of the inside of a computer, or even from what a line of code could do, but from her desire to tell a story. She was a storyteller, and gaming was a way she could make a whole new reality and continue telling stories. Her husband, Ken, who had been working a ton of different jobs in programming trying to make the most money, also seemed to align with this view that programming could help you make a new reality, but for different reasons. He explained at one point that with computers, "you can create your own universe, and you can do whatever you want within that. You don't have to deal with people" (Levy, 235). He meant this more from a business standpoint of liking that he could make tons of money and interact with people as little as possible, but he still shared the main message with his wife. She was shy but liked telling stories, and found that she could also create her own universe and do what she wanted through programming games.
Roberta's story brings me to my point about the changes in the Hacker ethic as it went to market, and the questions Levy poses. He asks about whether you can benefit from a computer if you did not program it, whether the spirit of hackerism could survive the success of the software industry, and overall implies the question of whether it is better to be a professional programmer / responsible engineer or a programmer with love for computing in your heart and hacker perfectionism in your soul. Instead of responding to that directly, I want to ask why it needs to be one or the other? Can the responsible engineer not also have a love for computing? Didn't all (or hopefully all) responsible engineers or professional programmers get into that profession because they had an interest, an attraction, maybe even a love, for what computing could do? I think they don't need to be separated in these two categories. I think that the software industry definitely changed the meaning of the spirit of hackerism, but that it still exists in all of the programmers today, and hopefully so does the love for computing and the desire to be a responsible engineer.
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