The Two Missions fo the 4MB Jam Organisation

mission_4mb.md

Mission Statement

The 4MB Jam, as an organisation, has both an ideological mission and a core mission. The core mission is more important than the ideological mission.

• The core mission is to continue the existence of the 4MB Jam community for as long as possible.
• The ideological mission can be briefly described as making developpers learn more about the main operating systems in use today, how their language's compiler or interpreter works and various programming knowhow that can help reduce the total size of an application when counting both the binaries and assets. The aims of this mission is to promote a consciencious usage of system resources to developers in an era where modern games can easily be bloated. This is not necessarily about making games that are under 4 megabytes, but about reintroducing into the mainstream the programming techniques that care about local storage and bandwith. Hopefully, the spread of such techniques may result in games that are smaller in size than current games. The benefits of such aims, if accomplished are threefold:
  1. Respect of client resources; the current situation is that developers treat the local storage and the bandwith of their clients as free real estate.
     • Considering the cost of storage nowadays, the callous disregard for storage forces uncomfortable choices for gamers: one either has to pay for more storage or uninstall games to make space for new games.
     • Fast or affordable internet connectivity is not a guarrentee, even in industrialized countries, nevermind developing nations and other states in between. Large games can therefore be unpleasantly long to download and even incur additional and expensive costs on the shoulders of gamers.
  2. Game longevity; smaller games have less chances than large games of getting uninstalled to make space for new games and hence are more likely to be replayed and receive continuous attention from their respective communities (which are often responsible for making mods, doing speedruns, organising tournaments and even making unofficial ports, which are all things that make a game live longer).
  3. Better impact on the environment; Storage media, whether it is SSD or HDD, are not eternal and their lifespan is affected by the usage we make of them. The intensive use brought about by large read/write operations can take their toll on such hardware and even drastically reduce their expected lifespan, which doesn't help the issue with e-waste, which is not a simple issue to solve. This also circles back to respecting client resources, as dead storage media will need to be replaced.