Joie de Vivre

“I live my job. I wake up and think about it, I talk to people about it, I use it to give meaning to my life, I understand the world better because of it, I complain about it pretty frequently. While all of this gives me perspective, it also hinders my objectivity regarding my profession.

So, when I was asked to give a speech about my job, I decided to take a break to maybe collect my thoughts and experiences over the years and come up with something that was relatively coherent.

I would like to begin by defining my line of work to the best of my abilities:

On business cards, my job is commissioned game development.

In theory, my job is to create custom-made games for my patrons based on their likes and dislikes.

In reality, my job is to understand the lives of unhappy people and offer them an escape in the form of an environment they can control and an environment which is designed exclusively for them.

To explain how I ended up in this position would be to go down a rabbit-hole but I will try my best to summarise.

By my mid to early teens, I had learnt just enough programming to be able to create a shoddy game with free-to-use assets, my inspiration behind this was an already existing game that seemed to have a wonderful concept but poor execution. I used the criticisms given by the fans of the game to create a game which was very similar in concept but had better execution.

While it seems morally ambiguous, teenage-me had liked the idea of the game a lot and had wanted to play it, seeing a similar consensus rise up on the internet, I was inspired to create something playable.

This game never gained much clout but being an uncreative teenager with a newfound skill, I decided to go on a quest to make unplayable games more playable in an unintentionally morally ambiguous manner.

I gained a very small following after doing this for a couple of years, I took requests of games from my followers and eventually it shifted from ripping off games and making them user-friendlier to taking requests and significantly altering existing games to appeal to my community.

A person who had kept up with my games from the beginning reached out to me one fateful day, asking me if I would create a custom-made game for him, based not on any existing game but on his overall preferences, that is, he wanted me to design an actual original game based on his lifestyle, his interests in movies, books, games etc.

While I was hesitant initially due to the sheer size of the task as well as the vagueness of his prompt, he was willing to pay me a hefty amount. Added to that was the fact that my parents were opposed to me pursuing game designing and so I had to start making money from it to be able to sustain it and to prove to them that there was a career in the field. Subconsciously, I had also wanted to move on from creating unoriginal content wherein I narrowly avoided consequences by changing the names of the characters sometimes.

This project was the start of my actual career. It began harmlessly and wonderfully, by me creating questionnaires for my patrons; asking them about their favourite games, their favourite movies, what they liked about said games and movies, about their life experiences etc.; making a game just for them (and maybe their closest friends sometimes) to enjoy.

Something I learnt along the way was that what people liked seeing on the screen was usually defined by their experiences in life, sometimes directly sometimes indirectly, sometimes positively sometimes negatively, sometimes subtly sometimes unabashedly. As the game market grew more competitive and my credibility simultaneously rose among my clients, my questions became more and more risqué, my games became more and more personalised and experimental.

And before I knew it, I was selling coping mechanisms.

Taking a break from my work and asking some of my recent patrons about how they perceived my work made me realise that the games I created were no longer just for enjoyment, they became small universes that reflected the wishes, the achievements, the vengeances and the victories of my clients. They acted as utopias my clients could control and escape to.

I had created so many monsters which took innocent people into lands far removed from reality.

Many of my recent patrons told me they found my games to be life-changing and could not put them down.

Never have I felt so conflicted about such a positive message.

I now find myself unable to return to work, everything I create feels suffocating, manipulative, overwhelming.

Many of these revelations have been long overdue at this point, these have been things I was always aware of and yet, I never questioned them or understood their depth. These have been things I deliberately ignored, no matter how glaringly obvious they became to me or those around me.”

I close the document without saving, taking a mental note to delete it or try to salvage it later.

This was my fourth attempt at this speech, this one too dissolved into an emotional mess near the end, I now sit in silence and wonder what the karma for so many ill deeds would be.

I also take a mental note to send an email to the organisers of the event, I have sent the same mail to so many organisers that I have a template at this point so it won't be a particularly taxing task.

For now, I crack my knuckles and get ready for a long day of work, I pull up the questionnaire available to clients on my website and start filling it for myself, and in another tab, I start researching myself, my works and my history.

I plan to go out with a bang.