I've done games-related development off and on for the last twenty years. In 1985 I quit my job and worked four months trying (unsuccessfully) to make a game for the Apple II, "NinjaQuest". In the early 90's I made a Windows SDK sample of a multiplayer game using the then-new multimedia API's. In the mid-1990's I got hooked on Muds and had a brief stint as a coder on LegendMud. In 2000 I joined the Flight Simulator team for eight months, putting together an X-file exporter for use with GMAX, and doing some minor coding for the scripting engine and the instrument lighting. Why did I do all this? Because I LOVE games. I like playing them, I like working on them. Even though I've done a number of game-related projects, Flight simulator was the only time you could say I was a game developer for a living.

One great pleasure in my current job in MSRC incubation is getting to work with other people who share my passion for gaming. One of these is Ralf Herbrich, co-founder of MSRC's new Applied Gaming group. Ralf is the co-inventor of TrueSkill, along with his fellow APG leader, Thore Graepel. They've got a lot of other exciting work that I can't talk about here yet, but I hope to be able to mention at least one other project they've done in a few more months.

Ralf has just started blogging, you can read his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/rherb. You should pester him to write more about gaming than that complicated machine learning stuff :)

Finally, one quote worth sharing about the nobility of making games, and working in entertainment in general (I wish I could remember who said it). To paraphrase: "People work 40 hours a week. We get to help make the rest of their hours as enjoyable as possible." My hat's off to people who make their living working on games. As long as they keep making them, I'll keep buying them and having a happier life for it.