So whatever happened to the whole PGDCE thing?

[SilverWarior]

Are they going to render in 2D using somebody's engine? whose engine? we have to be impartial, if we started using somebody's engine for the tutorials what will that do to other engines?

So we use the underlying API's? which one? GDI+? windows only? ok we'll add Quartz and X11 rendering - now we need an abstraction so our examples will compile across the board - oh whoops we've written a 2D graphics library.

And if we use OpenGL as an underlying API as you are suggesting aren't we also creating a 3D graphics library/engine?

Any way unless we are talking about graphics specific tutorials having discussion about which engine or graphic API to use is just pointless. Why? Because if we start limiting which engine or graphic API should tutorials use for their representation all we are doing is driving people away from writing any tutorials in the first place. Why? Because most of them won't be prepared to learn about specific engine or graphical API prior writing the tutorial. But they would be much more motivated to write a tutorial if they could use the engine or graphical API that they are used to work with.
Now you are surely thinking: "But that would be favoring one engine over other". Yes that is true. But you could always have other members porting the tutorial examples to work with other engines or graphical API's.
You see there is no rule saying that tutorials should be made by single person. They could always be made by groups of people or community as a whole. In fact having them made by group of people would surely lead to together quality of those tutorials.

but you can't escape 3D hardware - it will find you.

Really? How about all those old games (many still popular even today) that even predate 3D hardware. Games which had to run on computers that had far less processing power than even those non-smart phones that are out there.

And finally one thing you've not realised is that nearly every game you just listed - renders using 3D hardware

Not nearly every game but every game. But that is not due to game requiring 3D hardware but the sheer fact that every modern graphics card process all of the graphics in 3D. Even 2D graphics are processed as 3D with fixed Z orientation.

and that their scale and even aspects of their game-play are only possible due to 3D hardware.

I disagree with that. Why? Because none of the games that are on that list does suffer performance issues due to graphics cards not keeping up but instead due the CPU's not keeping up.