I love living in the bleak cyberpunk future. While trying to figure out the best way to properly tweet the in-game screenshots Saints Row 4 can take, I discovered that their web backend seems to be from a company that provides multiplayer video game backends as middleware.
This… this is a profession I couldn’t even begin to imagine explaining to someone in the early 1970s. God damn we are fucking Eloi. You can have a decent living (I’m assuming, from the size of the accounts Agora lists on their site) building the e-plumbing that helps people sit on their asses and share escapist dreams. Maybe sad if you think about people falling into video games over everything else. Maybe not. It’s complicated. And it’s also awesome that we are so far up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that we can actually devote resources to making this sort of problem to worry about.
Okay back to being a cartoon President of the United States who runs around punching people into the stratosphere.
When I worked at Sony I primarily worked on middleware for other people to write media-consumption applications for Sony CE devices (PS3, Xperia cellphones, Sony’s Google TV, etc.). All that software was built on other software, which was built on other software, which was built using tools made by others, and so on.
I wonder if anyone ever thought that way about other things, like toilet manufacturers (look, someone is paid to design and create a BOWL that you SIT ON which carries your WASTE away in a BIG PIPE using INDOOR PLUMBING!).