I hope you can come back to this comment years later with another perspective. If you read the comments on this thread, you will see how many people learned about github and FLOSS just from 2048. Its transparency and apparent simplicity have been huge draws for millions of people. It has changed the way lots of people think about software, and it has only been around for weeks.
The fact that anyone would question that a project like this would change the world indicates that there's still a kind of meta-narrative playing out in people's minds that tells them that only established players can have any real impact on things. It may seem chaotic, but any weekend project could become just as influential as any software out there.
We're still hopefully pretty early in the history of programming.
We still need large projects and always have. Your weekend project might win you the popularity contest and make you a millionaire, but will you still be in vogue the next year or the year after? We've already seen numerous of these changing the world entertainment products come and go, and yet the world is as it was, with the same basic problems continuing to get worse.
You'll never know. There could be some little girl who played it, loved it, picked it apart and ended up getting into programming herself, and she might be the cofounder of something that improves the lives of billions. You'll never know.
I didn't downvote you, but I think that's an exceedingly narrow view of causality. We've all been inspired by books, films, games, teachers, etc. If we go on to do great things, we owe a debt to everything that got us to where we go.
> If we go on to do great things, we owe a debt to everything that got us to where we go.
I agree, but the claim was essentially that "x changes y" is a transitive relation (I tried to express this notion in a less mathematical way, but it was the best I could come up with), which is an exceedingly broad view of causality.
If "changing the world" was as simple as spending a couple of days hacking up a simplistic browser game, a lot more people would do it. Similarly, if the criteria for "changed the world" were so low, the term would essentially be meaningless.
I'm definitely using a broad view of causality, yes. Whether that's excessive or not I think depends on what you're trying to achieve. I think of it from the perspective of- would I like to encourage or discourage whatever is happening?
> If "changing the world" was as simple as spending a couple of days hacking up a simplistic browser game, a lot more people would do it.
That sorta implies (to me) that a lot of people are doing things that genuinely change the world, in the high-criteria sense. Is that really true, though? I think the world would definitely be a richer place if we had a lot more "simplistic browser games"- elegant, engaging, entertaining. I can't say in advance what that would lead to, but I'm sure a world with 100 different versions of 2048 (and I don't mean direct copies, but different games altogether that were addictive, compelling and fun in different ways) would be a relatively more interesting world.
And it'll only take a couple of days per person, no? So why isn't this already the case? Why aren't we awash in this stuff? Is it because most people are busy working on more meaningful things? (Objectively I think we can say things like ending malaria, improving education, project: water, etc are all 'more meaningful' in an anthropocentric sense... but is that what most people are working on?)
How has 2048 changed the world?