My answer to the 20-10 question

$20 million dollars;  10 years to live.  What do you do?

I keep right on making and playing videogames.  Videogames are important.  The hard part is working out how to spend as much time with my family as possible and still make them.  Maybe work-from-home or something like that.  In fact, I'd probably do the Chris Crawford thing, and try my hand at interactive fiction, but I'd take a much different approach then he does.

Something I keep mentioning - I was burned out on videogames, then I read Richard Powers Plowing The Dark, and that gave me a whole new outlook.  The poetry of virtual space.  Keeps me going.

In other news, I made Blogged Out.  Woo!

Comments

[eh]

Why are videogames important?

[Factory]

Hmm it doesn't cost 2million a year for one guy to write a videogame, there's some money left on the table there.

[Patrick Hughes]

Video games are important because it is an endeavor whose goal is to provide entertainment to other humans, and the occasional dog that likes to howl a harmony to Parappa the Rappa. I speak from an in-the-trenches perspective, so take that in the same vein as you'd take the Meaning of Life speech by the waiter in Monty Python's movie...

=)

[eh]

Ashlee Simpson's last album is also an endeavor whose goal is to provide entertainment to other humans. Is it "important"?

[Patrick Hughes]

It was important to Ashlee. If you're querying whether Ashlee's album has import or effect, which I suspect is what you're trying to get at, you must define the arena to which you wish to measure Ashlee's influence.

I submit that Mikhail Putin is completely unimportant in the arena of pop music, however important he may be in the arena of global politics. And vice versa for Ashlee.

All of this is a fine example of why Socrates hated the Sophists =)

[Patrick Hughes]

meh, that's Vladimir Putin =D sorry

[eh]

Hey, you and JF were the ones who said that videogames were important in the first place. Perhaps you or he should define the arena. I'm just trying to figure out what is meant by statements like "videogames are important".

Pointing out the Ashlee analogy is just my way of getting at the meat of what is being said here. But, perhaps there is no meat...