alt Hacker NewsGreat article! Needless gendering absolutely hinders innnovation, in game design and elsewhere. (Not to mention the unfairness, oppression, and general absurdity).
Slightly unrelated, but the point about tutorials starting with the “basics”, i.e., “making a character move and attack” is interesting. On the one hand, if you have a strong enough grasp on programming fundamentals, it should be pretty easy to take what you learn there and make a “dress-up game”. Heck, a basic dress-up game shouldn’t be any harder than a platformer.
But if you lack that fundamental knowledge and are only interested in games, you need to develop it somehow, and you don’t want to build ‘boring’ console apps; games should be a platform for learning programming. So I agree wholeheartedly with the author: we need more diversity in introductory game programming tutorials!
Of course, that brings us to another can of worms with programming education: Tutorial Hell. But beginners need to start somewhere, and that somewhere should motivate them to continue learning and exploring on their own.
It is more than just a problem of tutorials. Game engines absolutely favor some genres over others.
If you are inexperienced and asking for advice on making a game, the most common answer nowadays is to use Unity. That is reasonable advice. Unity is a well established engine, with good tooling, a bunch of tutorials and community knowledge, and can be made to solve almost any problem you throw at it.
However, Unity is oriented around "traditional" games like the article describes: entities moving around in a 2d or 3d world. If your game fits that mold, you can have something up and running within a day; even with no experience. If it doesn't, you are going to need to spend time fighting the engine before you have even the basics of a playable environment.
Maybe you have an idea for a game that is story driven, where players read a portion of the story, then make a decision about what the character wants to do. If you know what you are doing, you would pick a light novel engine light RenPy, and you'll have your basic game environment up within a day.