Shuhari and the current tech landscape

Shuhari (ja: 守破離) is a Japanese concept that describes the stages of learning on the way to mastery. It’s usually translated as “follow the rules, break the rules, transcend the rules,” but I like to think of it as “adhere to the system, fuck the system, …now we have a new system.” The game industry right now feels like it’s well into the “break the rules” stage of Shuhari. People are recompiling games to run anywhere (even in your browser), and cease-and-desist letters are flying. When will the dominoes stop falling, and what will the landscape look like? That brings me back to something I wrote about a couple of months ago (though at the pace things are moving, it feels like a year ago): Games at the press of a button: The Rip-O-Bot (1989). In 1989, Bubble Bobble designer Fukio Mitsuji imagined a machine that could generate copycat games at the press of a button. His answer was that, in the end, the game is the idea. If we’re in Shuhari’s “break” stage now, the question is what the…

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