My first job as a professional was when I moved up to Texas and joined the Duke Nukem 3D team in, in the mid ‘90’s. And, um, the more I learned about, you know, George Broussard, uh, working with him, uh, and, and some of the other guys on the team, uh, like Allan [Blom], the more I realized that Duke and the fantasy that came with that was like a product of this -- it wasn’t the exact fantasies guys had, but it’s kind of the parsing of what they imagined that fantasy to be, you know. And, uh, and there’s something to that because, you know, in a simulation we can do things that we not only can't do in real life, but we shouldn’t do in real life. And it’s fun and safe to do it in a simulation. And this is useful because we don’t actually don’t want to explore this stuff in real life. It’s dangerous and we can get hurt or people can get hurt. But by exploring it in a simulated form, uh, eh, you, you kind of get some of that experience and some of that knowledge and the wisdom that comes from it. And it actually allows us probably to make better decisions in real life. Uh, and that’s, that’s kind of neat, you know, we can, we can simultaneously love the feeling of being a character like Duke Nukem, but also appreciate what, uh, uh, you know, I don’t want to say buffoon, but he’s a caricature of a, of a , of a human. He’s, you know, he’s simultaneously a role mod-, role model and someone we should never wish to be. That’s, that’s a dichotomy that is only rational to pursue in a simulated way.
