Tumblessai

The Carrot on the End of the Stick

I imagine everyone in the universe has a cumbersome rod protruding from their backside and over their head from which dangles the things they want most in life in front of them. Everyone I ever see; that guy driving and talking on the cell phone (later crashing and flipping off the freeway in a massive explosion, don’t drive and talk on the phone), that lady walking her dog, that guy in the mirror suspiciously creeping up behind me, and myself of course. It’s none of my business, but I always wonder what it is dangling in front of them that keeps them going and if they ever lose interest or… if they ever actually grab that thing.

I had a very intense conversation with my mother yesterday that was sort of something out of a movie. One of those movies where the main character is likable, which both the characters and the audience agree upon, but does nothing, which some people are in denial about, and has so many aspirations but gets none of them. Of course, after this super serious conversation, the character turns everything around and it’s all good and amazing and people in the theater like him feel validated. WELL it doesn’t happen that way in real life.

I’ve wanted to be a game designer for a long time. I won’t be humble about it, I have some damn good ideas and spend so much time analyzing game mechanics my understanding of how to make games is well beyond most people I come into contact with. I play a lot of games and break them down for analysis with equally as much vigor, deciphering what’s useful, what’s not, what makes something work and why it works, who cares, who won’t care, where the ideas may come from, where they may be best implemented, how to keep things balanced, how to spice things up, where games fall short, what ideas the game was shaped around, the list goes on FOR FUCKING EVER. But it means nothing without actual substance, something completed that validates my claims to know-how, as with anything else in the world.

We started out talking about World of Warcraft and about how I don’t want to play it, and it eventually turned into my Mom’s concern that I don’t put in the effort required to eventually be a game designer. My argument is that I play well over 30 different games a year, and I review them, and I discuss them (mostly because I silver-tongue a lot of my friends into getting anything I can play with them) with my friends, I get a lot of analysis out of these games and not actually playing WoW extensively probably won’t hurt me in the long run. I supplemented this by saying there’s nothing stopping me from just playing it if I need to. She then strung that argument into an argument about how I don’t do mods or my own games and how other people my age are already doing mods or have done mods. She talked about how some guy made free game mods for a site that makes game mods and got hired, she talked about how there’s tutorials all over the place (by now I’ve stopped talking) and how if I want to be a game designer I need to be doing things already but don’t seem to be doing anything. In my head, I reminded her I have the third prototype for a card game sitting in a box on the table between us, but I didn’t say anything because she brought it up on her own. Then she said it’s more than she’s ever done, which I couldn’t care less about as I didn’t need any more evidence that a lot of this conversation was about her but being aimed at me, and how I could be a great designer if I did all this work, and a bunch of other bullshit she was using to make me not feel bad.

But that point was long past, and I felt like shit. On the one hand, she’s right, and I don’t do any programming, I have no interest in programming, I’m a very goal-oriented person but what that ACTUALLY means is I just want goals to be finished and that I know what they are, not how to get to them and getting to them is something I have trouble with. It makes so much sense to some people, get a job, make money, then do what you want or get a job, learn how to do something, then use that familiarity to do what you really want to do, but for some reason I can’t wrap my head around doing something not 100% the thing I want to do and I lose all drive for it. So at this point in the “conversation” I’m wondering what’s the point, if I can’t do what I want because of some stupid inhibitions then why do anything, why not just die or join the army and shoot rocks for three years then come back and die homeless.

P.S. I don’t actually want to die, I’m just a bit of a sensationalist when it comes to being depressed.

Some dark thoughts indeed, but I thought them, and this isn’t a movie where people just get told some disgruntling information and suddenly they’re off to be the best person ever; I suppose I thought life would be more like that. Things that made sense got done, that’s what I thought, but it’s not true. Things don’t just happen because they make sense or because you want them to, you have to actually do them and put in effort and step outside of your comfort zone. The key to being successful lies in never being comfortable not chasing the carrot on the end of the stick.

And I have no idea what my carrot is.

Oh then my Mom comes in trying to cheer me up and is taken aback by my less-than-positive attitude, proceeds to tell me to just go ahead and have my pity party, then leaves. She made good points albeit from a horribly skewed perspective (my father was a game developer and then something else then unemployed for 7 years and now unemployed again, so, you can see where part of this comes from), was genuinely concerned about helping me, and I appreciate that, but sometimes… she needs to learn when she’s done enough, shut the fuck up and go to bed without trying to talk to me.

But this isn’t actually about my Mom it’s about me. It’s about… getting out of the come home-play video games, and turning my time from the small amount of productivity I have now (writing for www.XBLAFans.com is helping a lot) with gaming into mostly productive time using gaming for… fun. I guess. Well it sounds pretty stupid here, but the point is to reset my comfort zone such that I don’t like gaming for more than a couple of hours unless I set time aside for it, and instead need to be constantly working on projects.

My Mom talked about being real to myself about what I can do (which is where a lot of the pity/self-loathing kicked in) after which my first reaction was that I could do nothing really really well, and then I thought about it… And I still don’t know what I do really well, but people like me so… I guess… I don’t know where I’m going with this. Oh, career counseling at my college. I’ll go there? And… figure out what I might be good at? Or… perhaps, find a solid way to be a game designer? This is the part where I don’t know how to do what I need to do and freak out then go back to playing video games usually.

Here’s to that not happening this time! *glass clangs*