Sunday, December 25, 2016

The art of cutting edge, Doom 2 vs the modern Security Industry

During the holiday, I started playing Doom 2. I bet I’ve not touched this game in more than ten years. I can't even remember the last time I played it. My home directory was full of garbage and it was time to clean it up when I came across doom2.wad. I’ve been carrying this file around in my home directory for nearly twenty years now. It’s always there like an old friend you know you can call at any time, day or night. I decided it was time to install one of the doom engines and give it a go. I picked prboom, it’s something I used a long time ago and doesn’t have any fancy features like mouselook or jumping. Part of the appeal is to keep the experience close to the original. Plus if you could jump a lot of these levels would be substantially easier. The game depends on not having those features.

This game is a work of art. You don’t see games redefining the industry like this anymore. The original Doom is good, but Doom 2 is like adding color to a black and white picture, it adds a certain quality to it. The game has a story, it’s pretty bad but that's not why we play it. The appeal is the mix of puzzles, action, monsters, and just plain cleverness. I love those areas where you have two crazy huge monsters fighting, you wonder which will win, then start running like crazy when you realize the winner is now coming after you. The games today are good, but it’s not exactly the same. The graphics are great, the stories are great, the gameplay is great, but it’s not something new and exciting. Doom was new and exciting. It created a whole new genre of gaming, it became the bar every game that comes after it reaches for. There are plenty of old games that when played today are terrible, even with the glasses of nostalgia on. Doom has terrible graphics, but that doesn’t matter, the game is still fantastic.

This all got me thinking about how industries mature. Crazy new things stop happening, the existing players find a rhythm that works for them and they settle into it. When was the last time we saw a game that redefined the gaming industry? There aren’t many of these events. This brings us to the security industry. We’re at a point where everyone is waiting for an industry defining event. We know it has to happen but nobody knows what it will be.

I bet this is similar to gaming back in the days of Doom. The 486 just came out, it had a ton of horsepower compared to anything that had come before it. Anyone paying attention knew there were going to be awesome advancements. We gave smart people awesome new tools. They delivered.

Back to security now. We have tons of awesome new tools. Cloud, DevOps, Artificial Intelligence, Open Source, microservices, containers. The list is huge and we’re ready for the next big thing. We all know the way we do security today doesn’t really work, a lot of our ideas and practices are based on the best 2004 had to offer. What should we be doing in 2017 and beyond? Are there some big ideas we’re not paying attention to but should be?

Do you have thoughts on the next big thing? Or maybe which Doom 2 level is the best (Industrial Zone). Let me know.