Much of life runs at a pace indistinguishable from one to the next.  As much as we try to live every moment, we lapse into an easy rhythm with eyes looking no further than the next step.  It is with difficulty that we remember what yesterday's lunch was.

Then there are those moments when a cathartic agent enters our banal lives and we are shocked into living the moment as a participant rather than an observer.  Such an agent of wakening in my life this past week was James Van Alden.  A man more passionate and stubborn about his craft would be difficult to find.

A couple of hours with James reminded me of what a person with a camera can be; not a photographer, anyone with a camera and a trigger finger can be a photographer, but that rarer of breeds:  an artist.

A photographer is a cataloger of the world around him.  He records the events, places, and people of his time.  Some of his images might be more artful than others, but his subject matter can never transcend the corporeal world we live in.

A man like James Van Alden creates.  He makes tangible the ethereal world of dreams and visions.  The images he creates do not exist outside of his imagination until he wills them into existence with broad strokes of light and shadow.  His brush is the camera and his palette the unspoken desires that walk our dreams.

If God is the man who creates, let no serpent deter James Van Alden from his path. 

Where the women at?

That question was on my mind as, session after session, I found myself surrounded by men.  It reminded me the O.W.M. (Old White Men) who gather in corporate meeting rooms and government offices everywhere, though O.W.M. tend to be better dressed and don't sport purple mohawks.

Various statistics put the number of female video game players at 30%-60% of the total gaming populous.  You would have thought they were an endangered specifies relegated to myths if their attendence at the GDC was any indication of their existence.

It wasn't until I made my way over to the Expo portion of GDC on the second day that I saw the women.  They were a pretty lot, squeezed into tight shirts, handing out swag.  Booth babes.  They weren't as scandalously undressed as the ones that decorated the booths of E3, but it was obvious that men made the video games, made the business decisions, and did the secret handshakes in shuttered back rooms.

At the company I work for, less than 10% of my co-workers are women.  A quarter of them work in the front office.  It's not that we filter out women in the hiring process, it's just that we hardly ever see a resume from a woman.

If 30% of the doctoral recipients in mathematics are women, surely the video game industry can attract a better share of women into it's workforce.  Video games aren't just about wizards, orcs, and super soldiers on steroids--we've got, Barbie and Hello Kitty, etcetera, etcetera.