I heard DJ Spooky once describe himself as a "Perceptual Engineer", and though it's pretentious and nauseating for anyone else to say it, that dude taught classes on remix culture at Harvard, so I say it must be okay.

I'm a student in game design because I want to make games that I want to play, not because I want to re-make games that I already played and then go swim in my Scrooge McDuck gold vault/pool.  A high school English teacher once told me that I had to "learn the rules before breaking them", so that's what I'm doing.

I think of games as a field, and not an industry.  We are not the producers of consumable content but rather we are enablers of experience.  We have advantages in our field to which no other medium can come close, yet we spend 90% of our work doing imitations of those limited mediums.  Instead of aspiring to make people feel like they felt when they did something else, we should instead aspire to give people a feeling they've never had before, or fail enthusiastically in the pursuit.  

My icon was created by me, however it's free for any of you to use if you'd like.