Part of being in the creative industry, from my experience, is the constant internal pressure to move on to something “more creative.” You see it in actors who want to direct, in painters who grow more abstract, in singers who re-invent themselves (and not just to be relevant to a younger demographic).
For the past two weeks, I’ve been on vacation, and I’ve been wholeheartedly embracing the idea that someday, in a 2–5 year time-frame, I might leave the world of graphic design behind and try my hand at Game Design. That’s been a part of the reason for the silence on this blog … I haven’t known myself exactly where I would land on all of this, and so didn’t want to put anything down in black & white about it.
It all started with this graphic and this podcast, the creation & discovery of which coincided enough to suggest a good origin story for a career change. I talked excitedly with friends and family about how game design was a combination of all my interests (storytelling, art, interactivity, sociology, etc). They agreed wholeheartedly that it sounded like a good thing, and I set up a few meetings to discuss it, and went so far as to outline the three possible career paths that game design could lead to (for those interested, these were: 1. Starting an advergame company with time set aside for “real games,” 2. Working for an established game company, taking a substantial pay cut for the privilege of a cool career, and 3. Staying where I am now and working on games quietly on the side).
Looking at descriptions of who a game designer needed to be, it seemed like a great fit. These job postings or career advice boards all said the industry wanted people who wrote, who were interested in mythology, psychology, literature, art, music, and more. They wanted people with strong communicative skills and a team mentality. So far so good, I thought. They also wanted someone who loved games and had a deep knowledge of games.
Ah. Roadblock.
See, I used to be addicted to games as a young teen. We had our beloved N64 set up under our basement stairs, so I would crawl in there like some unholy mix of Harry Potter and his awful cousin, and play the afternoon away after school every day. And then, one day (I have no idea what flipped the switch in my brain) I just stopped. I have no idea why; I just put down the controller and never picked it back up.
I had played a few things here and there, casually — had joined my friends for rounds of Halo or Modern Warfare or jumped in on the occasional round of StarCraft, and had checked in now and then on a few artistic games like Limbo, Shadow of the Colossus, and Miegakure. But I wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination, a gamer.
So, when these descriptions of a game designer called for someone with a deep knowledge of games (which makes sense … a musician has to listen to music, after all), I realized, if I wanted a shot at this, I would have to figure out a way to fit games into my regular life.
If this post had a soundtrack, this is where I’d cue the themes from Jaws and/or Psycho. “Daaaa dum. Daaa dum.” “REE! REE! REE!”
You see, what I discovered over two weeks was that, no matter how I tried to makes games a casual and generally interesting part of life with my wife and beautiful, crazy one-year old daughter, it was like trying to make a stray, fat, one-eyed rottweiler a fun part of a road trip in an already-full car. Repeatedly, whether I put games early in the day or late, or in the middle, whether I played solo or with other people, whether I tried to bring my (unbelievably supportive, not to mention drop-dead beautiful) wife into what I was doing or leave her alone and not bother her, games always brought disagreement, lack of communication, and absence of harmony.
This isn’t true for all couples. My sister and her husband love to relax by playing games together, and bully for them! Seriously, I think that’s fantastic. But my wife and I have never had video games as a part of our life (although ask us sometime about our legendary Scrabble & The Office nights), so for us, in the end, it just plain Didn’t Work.
The bottom line, for me, is that no matter how fun a career might seem, if it means I’m less close to my family, it can’t be worth it. Sure, games are an entertaining pastime. Sure, they can be great vehicles for storytelling, can be amazing art. I played through Portal yesterday (leading to the conversation that led to this blog post), and I can say with certainty that it’s an incredible game/story/living movie. It’s the kind of game I would be proud to make, an almost perfect example of a great game, in my mind.
But if even the greatest game is just a catalyst for conflict between a man and the woman he loves, then that game is bad, no matter how well designed. And I’m not interested in being a part of that.
There’s no big moral here, I don’t think. Just my own personal discovery of where the lines fall for me. Family will always trump other interests, because there’s nothing anywhere that’s as valuable to me as the people I love.
Not even (ha) video games.