Idoiocracy

Tell us a cool story about Tim Sweeney. Any interesting programming anecdotes that reflect his brilliance and possibly eccentric personality?

Many years ago, I read an interview with Alex Garden, Relic founder, where he told the story of how you gave him seminal advice that guided him to be a programmer. Your advice was in a form of a daily schedule to follow -- "get up, go to class, come home, program. Eat, program some more. Do your homework, program, then go to bed. Rinse and repeat. Do that for a few years and you'll become a skilled programmer."

Do you recall giving this advice? If so, does that monkish devotion reflect your own development as you became a programmer?

What other words of advice would you give today to an aspiring game programmer?

Thank you for your time in answering these questions. I'm a longtime fan of you and your company.

Here are some links:

Wildman kickstarter

Wildman trailer

Interview on Gamasutra

I just bought and watched the movie and am completely disappointed at how overwrought and forced it is. The narrator's continual interjections about how the stories relate to him rather than allowing the viewer to come to a conclusion about how the stories relate to us is annoying at first, and grating by halfway into the movie.

The interviews are poorly structured, quickly flitting through different interviewees, often without sufficient context of their backstory, and end with little conclusion as to the lesson learned or what the different stories may have in common with each other.

Because the movie deals with a subject that I'm passionate about (about finding and pursuing one's life work and purpose in life), I'll go into specifics with some of the flaws:

• So much footage is used on behind the scenes shots, as in setting up the gear in the first interview, as well as multiple shots of the interviewee framed behind cameras in later interviews. The movie is peppered with uninteresting shots of the film crew traveling to their destination, or walking to the interviewee's home. I want to hear the backstory and thoughts from the people featured in the film, not seeing cameras being set up.

• I understand that the director chose to use the theme of the crew's story in making the film as the thread linking the subject matter. But this could have been better served as the final interview/story in the film, or more appropriately, in a behind the scenes feature that goes into how the making of the film paralleled the subject matter of the film itself. Having the director/narrator interject the second after every interview with his thoughts about the person's story and how it related to him was annoying and intrusive.

• A lot of the interviews are told without helpful context. At 17:30 when Vanda is introduced, it would be nice to know what industry she worked in and what her dreams were (and in the case of her story where she specified that she didn't know what she wanted to do growing up, it would have been nice to hear what she decided on ultimately, if anything, for what she is pursuing now). Her current age and period of her life would also have been useful to know. The movie ends and I still don't know what the point of Vanda's story is. This fault also occurs in other interviews (not all but several), where I'm left not knowing what industry the person was unhappy with and what their actual pursuit is.

• When context of the interviewees backstory is provided, it's told by the narrator instead of the interviewees themselves. This only makes the other times when the narrator talks about his story that much more grating to hear his voice.

• At 40:20, there is a pointless scene of the film crew laughing at something on their phone camera. Watching people laugh at something that I don't know what they're laughing at does not make for entertaining comedy.

• The most poignant interview of the film with Victoria at 47:00 is weakened by the narrator prefacing the interview by telling the audience that it's the most powerful story in the movie, then following the interview by describing how much it touched the narrator. There's an oft repeated lesson in storytelling - show, don't tell. I don't need the narrator to tell me how poignant the interview is -- I can come to that conclusion myself by watching Victoria's tearful expression.

• For all of the talk of having thousands of hours of interview footage and traveling 10,000 miles, the movie ends feeling like it hasn't gone very far and so much time was wasted on seeing behind-the-scenes footage of the filmmakers' story rather than the interviews themselves. The movie was only an hour long but dragged on, feeling twice its length.

• The director's reply in this Reddit thread saying that the biggest reason behind complacency stems from the people you surround yourself with is more enlightening than anything in the film. Worse, this lesson he types is nowhere to be found in the movie itself! None of the interviewees talk about the influence from others or how specific people discouraged their dreams.

• The montage of interviews from 37:50 to 39:40 is the best part of the movie, where different experts and authors on the subject (hearing more from them would have been welcome) chime in and discuss the psychology behind seeing others do the right thing and how that affects you based on a feeling of either guilt or animosity. That two-minute period in the film doesn't have the narrator butting in with his opinion, features the opinions of qualified interviewees, and is linked with a common theme or lesson.

I really wanted to like the movie based on the description and covering a topic I'm passionate about, but it was very disappointing. Kudos to the film crew for having completed something, but it being their first movie and their admittance to not having prepared as much as they'd like for the interviews shows in the film's lack of cohesion and forced message, rather than the more thoughtful, context filled film it could have been.

If you have time, I would love to hear the whole story as you tell it.