30 Years Of The World Wide Web And Being A Gamer

I have been gaming for a long time, a lot longer than 30 years than the World Wide Web has been around. There are people in my social circle that have not known the world without the web. I remember a time when it was new and exciting. Now it is just a tool  that has replaced mail order.

When I was studying for my degree it was something that people were talking about but nobody seemed to know anything about it. It was largely academic. By the time I got online at home, in the mid-nineties it was starting to become a thing. I mean more that just pron and news groups. It had stuff about gaming.

Back then it was pretty basic. There were a few photos but they were fairly low resolution. You could get bigger files but who had the time for them to download at 28.8k (which sadly is pretty close to the kack service I get where I live now). Pretty much everything was done by people who could create a webpage as there was little choice to do anything else.

As a gamer I am a bit of a tinkerer. The web initially gave me access to a huge range of ideas from other tinkerers. It gave me knew ideas and gave depth to ideas that I had myself. It really was more about substance over style. To my mind, some of the sites back then were driven by people with passion. There seemed to be a spirit of open co-operation where like minded people got together. I see that a lot less now with perhaps the exception of YouTube.

Back in the day I was a really bad painter. I look at some of the stuff I did back in the eighties and I want to cringe. What I have really taken from the Web is the ideas about "How To".This has been particularly important when it came to painting figures and making terrain. Now it is even allowing me to have my say and watch what people are doing.

On the downside it is now all about commerce. The old free days are long gone. Now I start to fear the way it works and I worry about my privacy.  If there was a sweet spot it was maybe a decade ago. That said YouTube is now the dominant form in which I consume media. Not just gaming but books, history, news and basically everything else.

My biggest fear is not that is going to turn all big brother on me. No, the biggest fear is that it is all going to go away. In Europe Article 13 is coming. What is actually going to happen is uncertain. What might happen is potentially quite scary. This can only mean bad things for smaller content providers as they will be the ones that ultimately will be pressured by bigger businesses.  I hope that the future of the Web is secure but I hope that the degree of freedom kind of remains the same.