As a brief programming note I wanted to highlight that I’m no longer working towards either a career position in gaming or a position about writing on gaming and game design on the Web.  The focus of this blog will now change.  I had a choice to either take a position with Amazon in Seattle or to take an onsite interview with Bioware.  I elected for the former and ultimately I believe it will be the better choice.  Although, it will be a demanding one and probably not as fun in the short-term.

Games I think are overlooked for their influence and intellectual appeal.  One does learn by playing, games are epistemological, and games also bring the full range of human emotion, positively and negatively.  Personally, however, the degree of commitment one has to have to stay current with the industry and the general zeitgeist is too much for me.  Or more accurately, it’s demanding a kind of mindfulness I’m no longer happy to accept.  Games are intellectual, but their industry and popular commentary largely is not.  This judgment can equally apply to any part of the Culture Industry, say the music recording industry.  But the topics I find worth discussing and thinking about with games are not really that well esteemed.  And finally, gaming largely suffers from a competitive ethic that is anti-intellectual; namely, what matters is winning and self-promotion.  That’s not a healthy mix for reflection, and again it demands a kind of thinking and being that’s just not who I am.

In this light, I’m putting my blog on hiatus to give myself enough time to move it to a new permanent host, and to strip out the endless spam comments.  At a glance, it looks like Blogger will or has also eliminated some of the genuine comments as well.  That’s unfortunate.  But I expect I won’t attract the same kind of attention anymore principally because I’m no longer intending to create it.