[Steven Conway speaking]: No. Um, god. Just … feckin’ do it. You know. Don’t wait on any golden trumpet to sound or anyone to usher you in. Just do it. Just write. Just research. Just think. You know? Just do it. Don’t wait on anyone’s permission. You know? I hate these, you know, barriers to entry that we construct, you know, for our own selfish needs and our own insecurities. Just do it, you know. And … yes, it’s fantastic to, to read these kinds of books because they will make you think and they will provoke you. I mean, that’s pretty much Judd’s, Ken’s, and Jason’s style is to provoke, to poke you. To be agonistic. And this is the one I always get my students actually so [unintelligible] so I’ll make people read certain things. And one of the kind of the founding chapters that every student has to read in my 101, so to speak, class is “Aimlessness” in Gaming Matters by Judd and Ken. And it basically takes the position that games are meaningless, games have no end. Games are an utter waste of time, and they interpellate you to create meaning and create a purpose through all of these strategies. And, you know, my students are … enraged by it, you know? They really, really need … need to believe that their … thousands of hours of doing this in their past has meaning outside of themselves, you know? They have this objectivist epistemology where there is this truth outside of themselves, and they’ve been involved in it; this meaning doesn’t come from them. It comes from out there, and they’ve been accessing it. And when I kind of explain, “No, you’ve generated that meaning, and it’s only in your head,” that’s really damaging. So I would say, yes, read, read, read, read. But you know, along with that just write, write, write, think, think, think. Just do it. Just apply whatever tool you’ve got in your tool box to start and see how it goes. What have you got to lose? You know. Trip up, bruise your knee, get up, and try again.

[Marc Ouellette speaking]: It doesn’t mow the lawn, it doesn’t cut the grass, or shovel the driveway, right? You’ve got to actually … At some point you’ve got to do the work. You actually have to do the work. And this is the … the advantage and disadvantage of letting you go first is that Steve will say exactly what I wanted to say. [Steve laughs] As you’ve noticed. And say it better. So that’s an advantage or a disadvantage. Yeah, and … and the other thing is that I recall … one of the few people who, you know, whose advice I would take. It wasn’t really advice so much as great moments of, you know, giving the whole truth and no matter how ugly it was. Was that there are two kinds of people in this business. There are those of us who have scratched around, scraped, clawed, worked our asses off no matter what in the face of anything and gotten what we’ve earned, and then there’s the people who had everything fall into place and then the follow-up was, “Marc, why would you want to be like them? They just become fascists anyway.” 

And you know there’s so much truth to that, you know. I don’t … I don’t really give advice, you know. I just, you know, if you want to get an A, double your work. If you want to get an A plus, double your work. You go to grad school, you didn’t get smarter by getting into grad school. The guy next to you just did. And how do you react to that I think is the biggest thing. And that’s … that’s the truth. I tell my first years the same thing, you know. You didn’t get smarter coming here, you just became average. You know? Congratulations, you are now average. Now deal with that. The guy next to you just got smarter. And what are you going to do? Is that going to eat you up or not? You know. And how many of us had students who were way smarter than us? In grad school, classmates in grad school who were way smarter than us. You know, the smartest guy in my year, out of seven of us? The smartest guy, he did one chapter. In seven years he did one chapter. He hadn’t finished … he was one of my TAs like my second year of teaching, and he ended up being one of my TAs because he still wasn’t done. And we started at the same time. And one chapter. And this was the smartest one of us. You actually have [unintelligible]. Feckin’ do it.

[Steven Conway speaking]: Feckin’ do it. My modification of Nike. Feckin’ do it.