> It's rare to see a real impassioned defense of gaming outside of "it's not that bad" but I'd like to go out and say it had a hugely positive impact on my life and I think it's really doubtful I'd be where I am today without gaming.
I owe my entire career to gaming. Shadowrun on the Sega Genesis made me want to be a hacker, EverQuest hacking turned me from a mediocre (at best) web dev to a competent reverse-engineer, and my first serious startup came about because I wanted to play Oblivion on OS X. Every huge leap in my technical abilities came about because of games; I wouldn't be anywhere near where I am today without the pushes that these amazing works of art gave me.
I created a system to convert Windows binaries to native Linux/OS X binaries and wrote my own implementation of a ton of Win32 APIs. Never did get Oblivion running, but did run several other games, most notably Prey. Eventually pivoted to implementing DX10 for Linux/Mac/Windows XP (back when Vista was the only one with it), and then the company died a little while later for unrelated reasons. You can read a postmortem here: https://daeken.dev/blog/2009-12-27_Alky_Postmortem.html
I owe my entire career to gaming. Shadowrun on the Sega Genesis made me want to be a hacker, EverQuest hacking turned me from a mediocre (at best) web dev to a competent reverse-engineer, and my first serious startup came about because I wanted to play Oblivion on OS X. Every huge leap in my technical abilities came about because of games; I wouldn't be anywhere near where I am today without the pushes that these amazing works of art gave me.