This is really good to know - one tends to brush over the little accomplishments in life.

With regard to the 7 day RPG article, I want to add that participating in the 48h game programming competition was an extreme amount of fun. I thought that it didn't exist anymore, but just found that there was another one in December: http://www.ludumdare.com/

Other game-making compos:

Pyweek (make a game in Python in a week) : http://www.pyweek.org

TIGSource compos (make a game in about a month, game-makers are allowed so you might think this is lame): http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?board=9.0

GameDev.net contests: http://www.gamedev.net/community/contest/

Retro remakes (currently recovering from a cracking attack): http://www.remakes.org/

"Gamma" series of compos : http://www.kokoromi.org/gamma/

Unfortunately they are all inactive at the moment.

Also there are "Game Jams" which occur in-person and usually aren't a proper competition, just an attempt at getting together and making cool games.

Examples: TIGJam, Indie Game Jam (deceased), OLPC Game Jam

Game hackathons are great. My absolute favorite thing about game design is that it brings together such an incredible variety of people: graphics designers, composers, writers, programmers, interface builders. The best game designers are ones that have some understanding of every aspect of their game, even as they specialize. I'd imagine the same is invaluable to startups.

I only participated in 1,5 48h game programming competitions, but it was really great. Especially with the irc chat going along with it, following real time what the others were doing and getting quick answers to common game programming problems.

Was your competition on-site? As in, did people all meet somewhere? Or was it all hosted online?

All online. The 48h competiton was really informal, no prices to be won either. Except for fun an fame.

Do you mean people who have something like this on their CV, or projects that are like this, or an attitude like this...?

The first and the third, which I would guess are identical. What we look for is an incurable tendency to build stuff. And if people have this quality, they'll presumably already have shown evidence of it by building stuff.

I feel like I have that incurable tendency to build stuff, but don't have time to use it. In fact, I'm extremely frustrated with my current job because I can't feed the need. How do others do it?

Joshua Schachter might be a useful example. He built Delicious while working on Wall Street. One of his most useful tricks was to build something every day, however small. I suspect that keeps your brain working in much the same way that running every day keeps your metabolism high.

I can attest to this. Most of OurDoings was built on 35-minute train rides.

That is good to hear. It seems that quality (perfection?) is secondary to actually building stuff, making mistakes, improving it, learning. As said in your essay, determination is more important than intelligence. Though "an incurable tendency to build stuff" sounds less depressing.

this article shows that you dont need a lot of time to build cool stuff

40 manhours is HUGE if you have a day job.

the average american watches 4 hours of tv a day. if you're average in that respect, you could churn out one of these projects every week and a half.

I'm not American, I don't watch more than 40 minutes TV per day.

Also, I can't imagine how anyone with a full-time day job (40 hours, nothing spectacular) can even manage 4 hours of free time. I don't think I have 4 hours a day.

But its also quite small compared to how long you might expect it would take to make a game.