Blowing His Own Raspberry

I’m down on my luck. I’m a nobody. Living out my life in anonymity, I am but three buckets of water and a handful of minerals distinguished only by my sentience. An insignificant speck of carbon, stuck to an inconspicuous speck of rock orbiting an inconsequential star. Lave, just one of any number of balls of hydrogen and helium burning in this Milky Way of ours.

And yet I have potential. I can turn things around, set out on a life of adventure. I have a little money, just what’s in the bank. It’s not a lot, but it’s a start. And I have a spaceship. It’s nothing much, a runabout with a weak little engine and barely enough space in the boot for my golf clubs. But it’ll get me moving.

Maybe I could be a trader, hawking my wares from star to star, wheeling and dealing, investing carefully in goods of the highest quality. Riding the waves of supply and demand, it wouldn’t take long before I’d earn my reputation.

But first I’d have to earn enough for a bigger ship. Maybe I’d be better off taking some juicy military contracts. I could upgrade the lasers on this old tub of mine and work for the good of the galaxy. Space is wild, and if I could tame it my reputation would soon be known to all.

Maybe I could cast my lot on the other side of the law. Maybe I could become a pirate. There must be thousands of suckers like me, heading out there into the big black, underprepared, overconfident. Space is ripe for the picking, but maybe that’s the kind of reputation I wouldn’t want.

The possibilities are endless, and the galaxy is my oyster. One thing’s for sure: I will earn my reputation and join the Elite.

Back to reality, and I have a confession to make. It might be a shock, coming from someone as nerdy as me, but I never played “Elite” on the BBC Micro.

I never had a BBC computer when I was young. I jumped straight into the ZX Spectrum on my seventh birthday, and the only access I had to the BBC system was at school, where we were only allowed to play Geordie Racer, an educational game about a pigeon.

The school also had one of those LOGO robots that you could control from the computer, but it cost so much that only the best kids were allowed a go and I wasn’t one of the best kids. It was rubbish, a mechanical tortoise with a biro stuck up its plastic cloaca, skittering about on the lino floor drawing wobbly geometric shapes like a mentally ill Roomba.

So I missed out on one of the iconic early video games, probably the most important game of its era. I’ve played it since, in recent times, briefly, and mainly out of historical interest.

Elite was born of tinkering. It was programmed to fulfil the visionary desire of its creators, partly to see what could be done with the extremely limited hardware of its day. The answer was remarkable. Proper 3D graphics and open-ended open-world gameplay. But primarily Elite exists because a programmer was bored playing other people’s and so made his own ideal game.

I played the sequel, “Frontier,” extensively, first on the Atari ST and then revisiting it on the PC. It was all we ever talked about at school for weeks after its release. We’d spend break times discussing tactics, where the best trade routes could be found, whether we favoured pulse or beam lasers. Rumours would spread that someone had made enough money to buy the Panther Clipper, the best spaceship in the game. We’d play late into the night, trying to catch up, longing to own that mammoth craft.

For all that Frontier was a bigger and more fully featured game than its forerunner it doesn’t attract the same kind of awe from nerds like me. Elite did something new, and something that hadn’t even seemed possible. Frontier was essentially Elite but swollen to fill the available RAM.

That raises an issue with what I talked about yesterday. Isn’t it the case that the joy of tinkering is in the act of creation? The pleasure of discovering something for yourself? And isn’t it also the case that all the simple code has been written?

Forget Bill Gates. Steve Jobs can go fiddle. The man who ushered in the era of modern computing was David Braben.

Braben was the man behind Elite and Frontier, and is eminently qualified to discuss the tinkerer’s mentality. In a recent interview posted on industry website Gama Sutra, Braben explained that kids can still be engaged by their own discoveries with computers, even if they aren’t original. He discussed the possibility of letting kids loose with social networking APIs like Facebook. It might not be revolutionary software design, but working out how to query the internet to find friends and then post pictures of boobs and willies on their walls would give kids a buzz. And in the process they’d be learning important skills in computer science, skills which may stick with them for their whole lives, as they have with me.

I’d add to Braben’s comments to say that not every successful game or product has to be huge and complicated, even in a marketplace dominated by AAA titles with Hollywood budgets. Games like World Of Goo, Braid, Uplink and Geometry Wars could all be made by bedroom upstarts and gain praise and recognition from the industry. Some of them were, and did. The people who made those games almost certainly tinkered as kids.

Now, with his Raspberry Pi, David Braben is bringing tinkering back. It’s a new product, soon to be released: a fully featured computer system about the size of a USB drive that plugs into your TV. It’s planned to cost just $25 and, excitingly, connects to a completely free and open online app-store. Anyone, from tinkering kids to talented professionals, can upload and share anything they make for others to enjoy.

It’s a bit of hardware that’s explicitly designed to encourage exploration, and that appeals to me a great deal. In addition to that, Braben’s venture is a registered charity, and hopes to use the money from its commercial release to supply free units to 750,000 school kids a year, and many more people in developing countries.

If we leave it to Apple, a whole generation of kids will grow up thinking that being creative on a computer means picking the best photo of their iPet to use as their phone’s welcome screen.

I’m a little bit in love with David Braben right now. I hope governments see the value of his idea and back it financially. It may be the last hope for a lost generation of nerds.