I blame the current state of affairs on a couple of points. I attack this topic from a personal point of view as a guy that entered college and obtained a degree in computer science with the intention of writing games.

1: I believe there is a general sense of business currently plaguing today's world of creativity. Corporate ideas, organization, and those that exist solely to tell others not only what to do at their job (manager) but also how to do it often get in the way of simply letting someone do their work in the way the worker's mind operates. I have written software for two companies, and there is a night and day difference between the two of them in regard to how the places are run.

My first place was terrible. Everything was extremely planned. Documents were exchanged, reviewed, reworked, detailed, edited (sometimes even for proper layout), code was written, and then that same code was reviewed letter by letter. The organizational methods enforced by the management were pushed so hard that they got in the way of the actual work itself! Trying to be overly efficient led to inefficiency!

My second (and current) place encourages input from the programmers. We can make suggestions of how to do things in a better way, and sometimes we get full creative control based on a simple design request. There is no micromanagement, few design documents (they are there when needed), and we don't do the code reviews. We write better software than my previous company, and there are six of us. Contrast that with the 100 programmers in the first place, and you have the difference between Office Space Incarnate and Creativity Central. Let the people that know what they are doing do what they know.

2: Piracy. It's been around a while, and it has grown over the years. Remember the 80s? Remember when the family had a computer, and said family was considered lucky if they had one? It was like television in the 1950s! "Nobody has two television sets." (Back to the Future). Nowadays it isn't just a single family computer or a college student that happens to be lucky. People have computers everywhere. Duplicating and pirating software is extremely easy to do, and the world wide web allows for easy distribution. The sheer volume of computers out there compared to the 80s naturally means there is a higher number of software titles pirated per day.

A company's desire to protect themselves from piracy has created an inconvenience for those that own software in a legitimate way. Consider the userbase repressed. Play your game. Okay, now put it away. That's a good gamer.

I am not encouraging piracy. I am saying that there needs to be a more open way to experiment and learn a system from a hardware and software standpoint. How can you expect people to be creative when you (the console providers) deny it? If someone sat down in their home and wrote a centipede clone for the Atari 400 in the early 1980s, they go "Landon Dyer" and get hired by Atari. If, in this more complicated age of 2001-2009, someone (let's phrase it in a way that Seamus Blackley can easily follow) buys an Xbox, chips it, flashes a new BIOS on it, acquires the Xbox development kit and writes an Xbox program that says "Hello World"....that person gets fined and thrown in jail.

Now in more recent days, end users have been oh so blessed with the legal opportunity to develop homebrew applications so long as they do it within the parameters specified by the manufacturer. Obtain the official game development kit (XNA Game studio for 360, I think). Remember to always follow the rules.

Hmm. Creativity and freedom go hand in hand. I don't have a cure-all solution, but you need to make sure you don't hold back the homebrew artists when you attempt to eliminate the pirates. And don't you dare ask where all the programming talent has gone - they are either stuffed away at some terrible corporate programming job or they transferred to the business school a LONG, long time ago.