Level Up Your Experience

I love video games…

The first game I ever played was Super Mario Brothers in the late 80s. I don’t think I was able to ever get past Bowser without a mushroom. This was the beginning of decades love of video games that spanned PCs and most of the popular developed consoles (no, I never owned Turbo Graphx or 3DO). There was just something magical about the experience of being able to pop in a new game and have a new interactive experience that seemed to rival any other media experience. At a young age I quickly developed the desire to become a video game programmer and latched on to any semblance.

Now, I find myself with much less time to play and view the activity with greater suspicion. I’ve read many negative stories about the consequence of addiction and have seen some myself squander my fair share of time that might have otherwise been better spent. In reflection, I imagine all of the criticism levied against it and my own internal evaluation and am sometimes left with surprise at my discovery. It has been a compelling motivator for me to continue my education and encapsulates so much of my interests in mathematics, art, engineering. Primitive or not, it has required the development of autonomous agent behavior long before the advent of LLMs. Video games developers for me have always been something of an imagined gold standard for the span of fields required. Game developers like John Carmack were extremely innovative in their approach to optimizing performance against limited resources. And so, I accept his fact about myself and wish to undertake the initiative to develop that game I never completed and explore all the facets of development in the process. No, I was never meant to be held as a heady intellectual, but follow me and maybe you’ll discover something you never considered before.