Tony Dumerton tagged me to make a list of 10 games that influenced my life. not games that i think are the best, and not games that affected me most as a game developer, just a list of games that affected my life in some way, even if circumstantial. i normally hate these tag meme things but this one reminds me of livejournal, so: 1 - immortal defense. ya im gonna include my own games, because which games have affected my life more than games ive released, really? immortal defense was my first commercial game and the first game for which i had literally dozens of fans who ive never met or otherwise encountered sending me nice emails about how it affected their lives 2 - saturated dreamers. taking up 7 years of my life to make, which is roughly a fifth of my life. i am not sure itll even be worth all that time when its released, but at least its a testament to sticking to something until its done, which a lot of people dont do and then wish they did 3 - xenogears. this game is basically what convinced me that i wanted to make games rather than go into biotech research, because i then felt (and still feel) that if someone wants to improve humanity, the easiest and strongest way to do that is to affect culture, for a number of reasons that maybe ill get into in some point but which would take too long here. scientists are still important! but yeah im saying that *on average* and *in potential* they are of lesser importance than artists, even indie game developers. in short: the person who invented cell phones changed the world enormously, but they got the idea to invent cell phones from star trek, which also influenced many other things, and if that inventor didnt invent it someone else would have, whereas if roddenberry didnt create star trek nobody else would have 4 - cave story, which is the game that got me into indie games, convinced me that one person (or a small group) really can make a game with a wide audience, etc. 5 - wingedmene, through which i met komera (game developer friend of mine from the ohrrpgce community whose game it was) and a bunch of ohrrpgce friends (too many to list, but like 20-30 of my facebook friends i met through the ohrrpgce engine) 6, 7 - sid meiers civilization and sid meiers alpha centauri. i learned a lot from those games, due to their extensive tech trees, each with descriptions. e.g. before i played civilization i had never even heard of, for example, feudalism, which it not only had as part of the tech tree, but had a nice encyclopedic description of which explained what it was all about. theres more real-world knowledge in civilization than youd think, if you bother to read the descriptions of each tech tree. and i read them at a relatively young age, so it was my introduction to a lot of concepts. alpha centauri was similar, except i played it much later, and its tech tree is mostly future technologies rather than past ones 8, 9, 10 - starcraft, league of legends, dofus: theyve affected me mainly in that they are social games and ive met some interesting people through them (e.g. Jorrit Lievens through dofus, Michael Cox through league of legends, grethsc through starcraft, etc.). these are also games that ive spent an enormous amount of time playing, easily 1000 hours each over the years, and anything you do for 1000 hours or more is a big part of your life really
Posted on: Fri, 26 Sep 2014 14:25:58 +0000