Editor's note: This paper was originally published in the
2000 Game Developer's Conference proceedings.

To the Moon and Back…

A few years ago, after Quake shipped, I decided it was time to move on from games. Although working on Quake was a great experience, it felt like doing another game would be much the same, but far less interesting the second time around. What I needed, I thought, was a software field with deep structure and long-term challenges-something more significant, difficult, and ultimately rewarding. So I figured it was the right time to switch over to work on natural language, which fit that description perfectly.

I figured wrong. By way of explanation, two stories and a conclusion:

Story the first: After a couple of years of natural language work, I thought about moving to the Games group at Microsoft, and went to talk with the folks over there. While I was talking to Andy Glaister, my future manager in Games, he asked me, "How old is your daughter now?" When I told him she was 13, he said, "Really? I always think of her as being three or four." This was interesting, considering he had never met her, and had only met me a few days before-but he had read about her in the articles I had written in Dr. Dobb's and elsewhere over the preceding decade or so. It was a useful reminder of how long I had been working on and writing about performance and graphics, and how that had always stayed challenging and interesting even as computers and software changed drastically through the years.

Story the second: While I was working on natural language, I read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book Flow, about what sort of work people are happiest doing. It turns out there's a sweet spot, where the work is challenging and stimulating but plausibly doable, and where success happens often enough to form a positive feedback loop. As I read this, I realized that it was basically a description of successful game development. True, games have short development cycles, and progress is made incrementally-but at least progress is made, while the short cycles mean that success in the form of shipping occurs often, and positive feedback in the form of seeing cool stuff on the screen happens pretty much nonstop. And for all the incremental nature of game advancement, in many ways games are pushing the envelope harder than almost any other kind of software-what else does a consumer need a 700 MHz machine with a high-end 3D accelerator for? Plus games cover a huge range of technologies-graphics, physics, modeling, scripting, AI, networking, databases-more than any other kind of software I can think of. What I finally realized was that, for me at least, game programming is the sweetest spot in all of software development.

In Robert A. Heinlein's story "It's Great To Be Back," a couple leaves the Moon, after working there for years and hating it: hating the lack of fresh air, the lack of weather, the lack of cozy old houses, the lack of normal people-basically, hating everything. They make no bones about their feelings, and when they get to Earth, they just keep saying, "It's great to be back!"-although sometimes it seems a little forced.

Gradually, the truth seeps in. Weather is often unpleasant. Germs are everywhere. Fresh air results in allergies. The old house they buy is falling apart. Worst of all, the people are rude and stupid, where the Loonies had been hand-picked for skills and compatiblity. Before the year is over, they realize they had been living in paradise and ask for their old jobs back, and before they know it, they're heading back to the Moon, saying "It'll be great to be back!"-and this time, it fits.

There's lots of interesting stuff to think about and work on in natural language, or in any of dozens of other types of software, for that matter, and there are lots of other worthwhile pursuits that have nothing to do with software-but in terms of rewarding challenge, stimulation, and flat-out excitement, having made the round trip and returned, all I can say is:

It's great to be back!