[Macsenour]

I made games for 30+ years and I had this exact question about year 4. I was sitting at home, writing some 6502 I think, and my cousin called. She had to call to tell me about a Commodore 64 game she bought from FisherPrice. She started to describe it to me, an educational game where you controlled a penguin who dropped letters down a chute to form words. I had to interrupt her to explain, I had written that game.

She had no idea I was the author and designer.

She spent the next 45 minutes telling me how it was the only game she and her daughter played together. She told me that her daughter was motivated to read, and became an avid reader, after playing my game.

I never felt more rewarded, or that I was doing the right thing with my life so mach as during that conversation.

Somehow I think it fair to add that the last game I was the producer for, involved pushing over a port-o-potty, putting wheels on it and then pushing it down a hill and off a cliff to see how far it would go. Don't laugh, Potty Racers went to #1 in the App Store...

[fit2rule]

On the flipside: I once worked for a major games vendor (won't say who) and had this terrible experience - worked 60hour-weeks 5 in a row, to get the online multiplayer backend running and able to support more than a few hundred users. Got it up, deployed, rolled out, in use.

Come in the next day, the CEO and all the head devs are crowed around the server console, watching the stats after release, this conversation happens, verbatim (I still remember every detail):

    CEO: "Time for my favourite question - How long has the longest 
    player online been playing?"
    HeadDev: "Lets see .. 12 hours since we launched, longest active 
    session is .. 11 hours, 45 minutes.  No pause."
    CEO: "HOORAY!!  CELEBRATION!  WE GOT OUR FIRST ADDICT!!!!"
    HeadDev: "Yay!"
    CEO: "Wait .. how old is he.. ?"
    HeadDev: "Profile says: 12"
    CEO: "YAY, he'll be with us for years!"
    Me: "Isn't that a bit .. unhealthy .. for a 12 year old?  Its summer, 
    schools out, the kid should be .. enjoying some weather?"
    CEO: "We don't like that thinking here .. are you sure you 
    know who you work for?"

Oh well, that killed the games industry for me, well and good. Haven't logged on to a multiplayer game in 12 years.

TL;DR: The people behind the curtain do not have your best interests in minds, kidz ..

[thenomad]

Some of my best memories from around that age involve playing a computer game for close to 12 hours straight. I remember spending at least a month of summer playing through the Bard's Tale on the Spectrum.

Indeed, similar things have been a rewarding experience for me for the majority of my life.

Last time I did something similar was at the release of WoW: Cataclysm, I think, with my girlfriend. It was a great holiday.

[prawks]

Ditto. All-night LANs at our parents' houses playing Counter-Strike and other Half-Life mods, WC3, Starcraft, Diablo 1 & 2 in the basement.

Online games aren't all addiction and grinding and no-sunlight, there are an immense amount of social interactions going on. I attribute much of my writing skill to posting on internet forums with people I met playing video games, and chatting in-game.

[thenomad]

/agree .

I was counting up everything I'd gotten from playing WoW alone the other day, and it included a great relationship, a business that made me $xx,xxx, a whole load of new friends, experience and ideas for managing large groups that I'd never have gotten another way, LUA programming skills, some fantastic memories, and a major film project.

Works for me :)

[CmonDev]

Which geek did not play for 12 hours one day?

[girvo]

Man... Half-Life 1 and the OG Unreal Tournament.

The former was more playing with Visual C++ 6.0 with the SDK, mind you. The latter was just hours and hours of team death match and CTF. So good.

[angersock]

Modding HL was how I got my first real introduction to C/C++; I follow a bunch of tutorials off of Wavelength/Radium (I think?) and managed to change a few things.

It seems like the mod scene for a lot of games has kind of died out, at least for shooters.

[girvo]

> It seems like the mod scene for a lot of games has kind of died out, at least for shooters.

Yeah, definitely. Although the Doom engine releases are neat to play with. If I was creating a total conversion these days, I'd probably do it with the Doom 3 engine... which is sad, because that thing is old. Still looks great though, and beats using Darkplaces!

[GotAnyMegadeth]

Every now and then me and a school friend meet up and try to play through a game in one sitting. So far we've done Super Mario World, Mario 64, Diddy Kong Racing and Gears of War II.

[fit2rule]

Those who had and did their homework, or wrote code, or tried to do something with computers other than just waste time.

Lots of geeks don't play games.

[mcv]

My brother wrote the games, and I played them. I remember playing his tetris for hours on end because he wasn't aware that speed had to increase (he'd only glimpsed the original briefly).

[CmonDev]

I managed to do both :). My statement was a generalization, but I had seen more gamer programmers than not.

[fit2rule]

Ah, I'm with you anyway, I did indeed spend hours and hours and hours, at one point in my life, gaming away .. for me it was Descent2 and Warcraft2, the good ol' 90's, and well .. it didn't last long. I realized I was better off writing code than running someone elses. ;)

[golergka]

CEO's attitude towards the business is stupid. I would quit that company not because I would feel that I was doing something unethical, but because the CEO knows nothing about an industry he works in.

I made several online games, and there are people who addicted to them. I don't feel guilty for it. In each case of such addiction that I've witnessed, the person was in such a situation and such a state of mind that I think they got lucky to get addicted to a game, and not something worse. All of them created relationships and friendships in the game, and when they wanted to quit, quit.

[Sodaware]

If it makes you feel any better, when I saw my nephews this summer they were all showing me their favourite things. The youngest is quite fond of Potty Racers, so we had some time together playing through it and he would talk about strategies etc. He usually gets drowned out by his brothers, so it was nice to have some quiet time where he could show off.

[unwind]

That sounds like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnhUiYMek2c ("Alpha Build"). I've never played it, but I loved your story so I had to dig a little. Very cool. :)

[Macsenour]

Yep! That's the game. Side note: my mother wrote the theme music.