I realized that really everything is a competition for my time and entertainment dollars. All new ventures should be compared to the best of their time – would I play WoW, or read the best book, or listen to great music or watch a great movie?

It’s a bit like being in a loud family with lots of kids and grandkids – if you aren’t interesting, then you’re sitting at the end of the table with the bowl of asparagus-flavoured ice cream.

I don’t want to be the ice-cream guy.

But more, it really is about writing the thing in the first place. If I’m not having more fun creating than consuming, I’m doing something wrong.

Computer games can be hugely creative, though; I love WoW because I get to make up characters in the RP realms. Occasionally, you get to meet tremendously interesting people who are basically doing improv while they play. (Yes, all right, mostly you don’t.) Some of the ideas I come up with occasionally make it through to my writing. (Monster fishrabbits, I think, may well have been one of those.)

And then there’s stuff like Creatures. You might not think of a life-simulator game as being a venue for creativity, but I really did enjoy turning Tom‘s collection of carefully-nurtured artificial intelligences into a cadre Socialist Revolutionaries by persuading one of them that the word for “like” was “historical process”, that “cheese” was “dictatorship of the proletariat” and so on, and then allowing him to teach all the others.

“Bertie want metapraxis!”

“No! Algonquin want control of means of production!”