I have always thought of video games in terms of the world they present, the system of how things work and what can happen, and the thought of creating my own worlds to explore and fill with secrets and share is incredibly tantalizing. When I recall my early experiences with video games, they were just as bound up in the experience of puzzling out the command line interface, navigating the directory and getting peripherals to work as they were in playing the game.

Those early enclosing systems (for me, the Commodore 64 , the Apple II and MS-DOS) were so mysterious, and the sense of danger was always palpable (as I would, on occasion, wonder about the function of a batch file or program, and perform the system equivalent of (Q)uaff potion). Some afternoons, I would just mess around and create shells and never play any games. I still primarily think of video games as systems; not cold, calculating latices of commands, but ecosystems and civilizations, living or otherwise.

My students are maybe more directly inspiring, as well; by the end of the year, almost any first grade journal has enough material in it for at least a hundred games. My kids hold video games in such reverence, too. One girl in my class told me that her family likes to gather around to watch her mom play Super Mario Galaxy 2. Apparently they all cheer for her and encourage her as she beats bosses and gets stars. As she told me, she was completely, transparently proud of her mom. It was such a communicative moment for her, a moment where she knew her mom and felt close to her.

That’s what inspires me to keep developing games. Maybe someday, I will create something that will inspire the same curiosity that I experienced when I was introduced to computers, or maybe eventually something that I make will be important enough to be breathlessly described in the thin space between literacy and science.