To be fair, you have the 6th highest karma on a discussion site on the Internet that, on a good day, 0.0001% of the world's population looks at. Not criticizing.. jus' sayin', is all ;-)

I know, I know, I'm only envious :-)

from commets to TFA:

To everyone belittling his 'waste' of 5 years of his life on a pointless endeavour, remember that in life, everything is essentially pointless, you are born, you live, you die. And thats that.

You may in life build the perfect Simcity city, or refurbished a muscle car, or discover electricity. But at the end of the day you end up dead, and its all irrelevant.

I'm sure that people like Martin Luther King Jr and others who have made a difference would beg to differ.

Your life doesn't have to be pointless.

Your two sentences are inconsistent.

The assertion was that life or existence itself is pointless, nothing to do with the esteem of individuals. You say "people like Martin Luther King Jr" would beg to differ about gtt's assertion, but you follow-up by saying "your life doesn't have to be pointless." So, a life can be pointless? So you disagree with MLK? Either that, or your entire comment doesn't really have anything to do with gtt's.

Regardless, the worth of an individual wasn't really what gtt was getting at.

So, SimCity guy felt compelled to be awesome at SimCity, besides that I don't know much else about him. But there are billions of people in the world, so there is room for someone like him and there is almost no reason to stifle diversity in personalities. After all, that's how MLK eventually came to be. Perhaps the same force that compels SimCity guy to build awesome Megacities is compelling him to do something else that most people would consider more worthwhile.

It's no worse than the three years of TV that millions of people have spent their time on for the last 3 years.

I've actually found play to be indispensable at being the best you can be at work. Because the end result really doesn't matter, play lets you experiment more than you would otherwise. This experimentation allows you to discover possibilities that you otherwise would have been too risky. Normally this applies to playing around in the same domain as your work (I make stupid/playful websites to practice my web programming skills, for example.)

This is just a video game, but there are still a lot of transferable skills that are practiced: concentration, planning, forethought, logical thinking, multi-variable problem solving, persistence, etc. These habits would serve him well on a programming job, for instance.

Actually given the stated time span, I think this would have been an occasional side project.