When I stumbled across Jim’s Flash Bestiary, I felt like a kid in a toy store. Jim’s got examples of circles and kaleidescopes, natural phenomena and fractals, physical simulations, oddments, mazes and labyrinths, fun with text and classic games. His classic games includes Flash implementations of Asteroids, Frogger and Pong. His physical simulations includes a Flash version of sodaplay. For each of these examples, there’s a link to download the Flash file with all the source code. Not only is Jim generous with his demos, he is also generous with his advice in the Flash Kit forums.

Jim’s also an inspirational example of a programmer to me, given that his areas of interest and expertise are not narrow. On his old jbum.com website, I found that he’s interested in music, books, language and lexicons and computer-generated art. There’s a niche for people like him. He works in interactive television. Chris Crawford believes that game programmers would be more effective if they were also artists. In fact, he wrote that artists should learn to program, because programming can be learned, but artistic skill is something one has to be born with. In his experience, though, most artists refuse to buckle down and learn to use step-by-step, cold, hard logic. He thinks this reluctance on their part is more the result of a mental block than a lack of aptitude. He hopes that in the future, more people will bridge the cultural divide between science/technology and the arts/the humanities. For now, he sees most techies as living in a self-reinforcing bubble. He also sees most people with a humanities and/or artistic background as living in a bubble. But but he credits artists and storytellers with more often making efforts to reach out to the game world techies. (I have a lot of stories of my own to tell about the techies I know, but I’ll refrain, until I’m independently wealthy )