All work and no play makes jack a dull boy.

So my wife Rachel walks up behind me last night as I sit at computer desk, with my boy Drew (4 years old) in my lap.  He's watching me as I furiously type into a text window on blogger:

all work and no play makes jack a dull boy. all work and no play makes jack a dull boy. all work and no play makes jack a dull boy. all work and no play makes jack a dull boy. all work and no play makes jack a dull boy.

Rachel says "so ..."

and I say "Drew asked me what blogging is.  I'm showing him."

Careers in video gaming

I think that, when I was a teenager and I assumed that jobs in creating video games were practically impossible to score, I was completely wrong about the future. I think I missed the point that, as more humans reach adulthood having been raised on videogames, the audience for games would rapidly increase which would make a bigger market for Valve, Blizzard, and the indie houses to develop more games.

I also didn't expect the increase in gaming platforms. Let me elaborate:

There became commonly 3 consoles from any competing vendor that are active: current gen (PS3), last gen but still generating active sales (PS2), handheld (PSP) - multiply that by as many vendors as can stay in the market (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo currently).

Add in the computer/OS platforms (Win32, MacOS, *nix).

Then add the new entry: miscellaneous personal digital devices. These are devices that can game even though they aren't built for it. Cell phones dominate this category, but PDAs, GPS, other devices can be treated similarly. Hell, I've seen donkey kong on a digicam.

Finally, new budgets for games have allowed an increase in quality/complexity that allow much larger teams to work on any one title. All of this spells out a ton more jobs in video gaming than earlier decades.

Now I think it would have been not only reasonable, but insightful for me to have angled for a career in making video games, even if I can't build 3D engines like John Carmack.

I got to thinking about this after reading an Offworld article predicting a near future where all people are gamers, just as all people are exposed to the other major forms of artistic media: music, movies, books.

What I'm Playing Now: Bioshock

Actually, it's what I'm Not playing. I picked up a copy of Bioshock recently at the discount price of $5 during a Steam sale. I felt obligated to buy it after listening to Tycho rave about Bioshock for years, seeing it's 96 metascore on steam, and seeing it featured in an early HAWP.

Though I really wanted to finish the game before I read through any spoilers on first-person-shouter or otherwise, I've had to give up. I just don't like this game - not even a little.

I'm still early on, too - I haven't even fought a big daddy yet. ...but I have seen the gatherer's garden, and all the things you can 'buy' with ADAM. It's all junk. This game hinges on the player's concern with making huge moral decisions in the drive to acquire more ADAM - and I couldn't care less about ADAM. That's a problem.

I did like the art & music, though, and wondered what Rapture looked like before it was destroyed. That may be what we get with Bioshock 2, according to this offworld post.

Please Stop Quoting John Quincy Adams

Sometimes I need some Lorem Ipsum Dolor text when drafting, but Lorem Ipsum is overused. Recently I decided instead to pay homage to satirewire by quoting JQA instead - but scrambled into a Greek font.

This is what the reader of my project plans will see if they squint hard enough:




And this is the English representation of that same text:



I can't believe it's been 9 years since Andrew Marlatt wrote that joke. Why does it stick with me?