I’m an artist and story teller working in Video Games and Training for the past 19 years. I have also dabbled in product design and robotics over the last 3 years. I’ve been wanting to make things in 3d since I saw my first chrome sphere on a checkered plane. The first program I ever wrote was in basic, and it was an approximation of that image

. Tron (1986) was a major inspiration to me, not only did it introduce me to the concept of building worlds inside the computer, but it also interested me in the idea of making things come out of the computer. On my 386, I started designing cars and doing color cycling animations in a little program called Deluxe Paint II. Later, when I got to college, I managed to do a few shifts at the FSU TV station, finally getting to use Lightwave for the first time on an old Amiga. It was shortly after this time that I abandoned my Accounting/Finance degree and started pursuing 3d animation and art. If you know me, you’ll probably understand that I stopped working on the business degree when I realized that Wall Street financialization was mostly just betting, obfuscated by calculus. Derivatives were the last straw for me, and I have forever been vexed by the fact that I would have benefitted from a computer science minor, and the mathematics that would have gone with that. I’m just now starting to learn programing for games and robotics in order to start my first company.

My time at n-Space showed me that, with hard work and good people, my dreams could be realized. It also showed me some of the pitfalls of working contract to contract on someone else’s IP. I proposed a Toys to Life game to n-Space back in 2006, and it was passed over because we didn’t have a toy company connection. Then, in 2011, after n-Space almost died the first time, (They went out of business last year) I got a chance to work on a game with most of the mechanics I came up with. Skylanders, and the many games modeled after it are now very profitable genre’s of children’s entertainment, for which I have seen little financial benefit. I had a good notion that the game mechanic would work well, because I modeled it on how I used to play with my new toys as a kid. I would always look for the newest G.I. Joe or robot du jour and try to be the first one to obtain it, learn it’s special abilities, and master the art of arguing why my character would win over my friend’s in mortal combat.

I look to now start down a different path, away from entertainment, and towards something I’m calling imagination facilitation. It’s not education, training, video games,or ‘edutainment’. I think we can all benefit from playing and making things in VR as a safe and inexpensive place to try out new ideas, test our assumptions, and accelerate our intellectual evolution. I think I will make it my life’s work to bring this to fruition.

As I was reading through Ready Player One, I had a real connection to the character of James Halliday, although I think I would create Ludus with a completely different implementation.

Jim Inziello
Game Dev/3d Designer/Futurist
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UniCron Studios