10 Years of Fun and Games

It feels like I ought to mark the occasion? I’ve been feeling reflective the past few months because it’s been 10 years since I joined the ‘games industry’. That’s a long time, so I’ve been looking back and thinking about what I’ve been doing in the past decade.

In the fall of 2015, I started in the MFA program at the NYU Game Center, which at the time was pretty brand new and had only just graduated it’s second class. I had no experience in games or even the arts, and was suddenly spending all of time on games, and never quite stopped. Prior to grad school, I worked as an analyst in finance and ecommerce. Sometimes I still feel like a newcomer to games, because I had this whole other career before, so it’s funny to me now that period of my life (post-college, pre-grad school) is actually the shorter one now.

In many ways the decision to pursue a career in games was, of course, a bad one. At least in the material sense. While not financially ruinous, I’m certainly worse off. I came across some old tax returns the other day, and it was depressing to be reminded that even in my best years as a game designer in my 30s, I made the same or less than I had as an analyst in my 20s. A decade of stagnant or negative income growth can grind on you, a little bit. I don’t really feel the lack so much myself; I’m a pretty frugal person and I don’t have expensive tastes. But since having a kid, precarity looms over you a bit more darkly.

Not being financially successful could maybe be offset by artistic success. But I don’t feel especially successful in my games career. My body of work, such as it is, is small. Most of my time gets taken up with my various ‘day jobs’, which are usually at least games-related or games-adjacent, but nonetheless take up a lot of time and mental energy. I love making games, nothing makes me happier, so it saddens me how little time I actually get to do that. Besides commercial freelancing, my primary line of work has been teaching. I enjoy it and take a lot of pride in it, but I also recognize that it’s something of a dead-end job. There’s no upward trajectory to adjunct teaching, and it isn’t especially respected. I’ve applied to a couple fulltime jobs, and gotten a few steps into the byzantine academic hiring process, but the positions are too competitive and my accomplishments too meagre. None of that seems likely to change anytime soon.

When I take stock of things like this, I think I should feel like a failure. But surprisingly, to me most of all, I don’t.

I try to keep in mind the context. It’s been a profoundly unhappy decade in the wider world writ large. Spanning two Trump administrations and a global pandemic, with so many minor and major disasters that it’s difficult to catalogue them all. The economy has this ever more desperate feeling to it, as more and more is staked on increasingly unlikely speculative bets. Some of the disappointment I feel is rooted in expectations that are a product of, essentially, a bygone era. And the games industry itself has been having a particularly hard time. I routinely see people much more experienced, successful and prominent than me suddenly get laid off and having to look for work on Bluesky. I’ve known many talented people who’ve had to leave games altogether. I try to remind myself that even if it sometimes feels hard to believe, that under these circumstances I am actually a (modest) success at this.

And I’m grateful for it. Working in the arts is hard, much harder than it should be. So what a gift it is that all the work I do involves working on games, with people who love games like I do. I get to spend so much of my days thinking about art, in some form or another. What else could I ask for? It’s been an awfully hard ten years, yes, but it’s also been some of the happiest times of my life. The alternate universe me who kept a stable job might be like, a homeowner, but I wouldn’t trade places with him.

I think a big part of that is from getting to teach. It’s hard work, often emotionally draining, and generally unappreciated, even by the institutions which provide it. But it’s also incredibly rewarding. What a privilege it is, getting to talk and share ideas with people, getting to see their work. I don’t think I’m best professor, especially not for every student. But once or twice a year, I’ll get an email which brings tears to my eyes. So much of the time, you don’t really realize the impact you can have on someone. I used to prepare sales reports about diapers. There’s really no comparison.

When I look over what I’ve done these past ten years, I’m not disappointed in myself, or filled with regrets. I’m proud. I’d do it all over again.

Looking forward, there’s many things I want to be different. I want more economic security and to provide for my family. I want to make more things and connect with people. It’s hard to feel any sort of optimism, the outlook for most things feels grim. But instead of hope, there’s a strange kind of stability in being where you’re supposed to be and doing what you should be doing. I don’t know. When I was younger, I often felt pretty smart. I rarely feel smart these days, but very occasionally, I feel a little bit wise.

There’s an artist, Suzanne Treister, who has a series that I really love of imagined Amiga programs. My favorite one of the set has for many years been my desktop background, which means it frequently appears projected in a classroom when I first connect my laptop. A student once looked and read it aloud, “Would you recognize a virtual paradise?”. They were really asking what it was, or perhaps what it meant. But, impulsively, all I could do was demand, “Well? Would you?“