Another fruitless week. Let me write this blog as a way to reflect on my current state of life and try to live a more fulfilling life for times to come.
The most boring section in the world
I have been at my part-time job for ~5 months now and I am about to transition into a full-time worker soon. I am someone who doesn’t care that much about “building” my career, these words feel barely real. There are so many “games” revolved around Linkedin, job interviews, a bunch of bullcrap… It is a shitty game, the world is a shitty game that I have little interest in participating in. Welp, I am saved by kinship-based nepotism. People praise me for nothing and I never have to grow up, great!
As a future full-timer, it is kind of concerning to me that I never seem to have enough energy to do 8 hours of work. I am struggling with various health issues: My eyes can barely open and it is slightly blurry when I am trying to look at my computer. Sometimes, I am just too tired to do work and it is easy to revert to “bad habits” of phone scrolling for 2 hours until all the time is gone. My kidney is in small doses of pain from time to time. My digestion has been improving somewhat ever since the standing desk is implemented, but still not very good. So many problems…
It is the best thing for me I think. I hate the concept of career development so much that I am okay with spending the rest of my life working with this company, even if my wage is mediocre and the job is not fulfilling.
If only work is a video game, then I can destroy it the same way I destroy other games, but ultimately a game not worth talking about too much. Unclear tutorials, downward progression system, bureaucratic decision-making system, too much grinding, unsatisfying reward system, flat difficulty curve… What kind of game demands players to spend at least 8 hours a day or else they die? *Claps hands* Developer? Hello? Why aren’t you working 24/7 so that I don’t have to work? Why fix the game is no? Thanks.
People I am working with are generally really tame and normal humans. I have a problem, where I always feel like my presence is just a burden no matter what, but so far I have only been normally supported. Still, remote work kind of sucks when it comes to actually connect with one another. I wrote about remote work for HR before where I advocated for it because of “research papers”. It seems like quite a lot of effort is placed into “socializing” the team.
My workplace initiated programs such as “Donut”, where we can connect with a random person in the company to chat once every two weeks. For three times, no one initiated a conversation. The one time I connected with someone in “Donut”, it was really awkward and I really regret not being able to sympathize with her better, when I definitely could because I have met Venezuelan netizens who talked to me about his insanity of a situation. After finding out that I have the option to leave “Donut”, I left to avoid further awkwardness.
It is also hard to find small talks in the company. In a normal company setting, it is probably a lot easier to meet up after work and go somewhere fun together, or commute home together and chit chat. Much harder when it comes to remote work since every minute I spend on Slack is “company time”. Of course, it is also mostly my problem since I am extremely antisocial and monotone.
Work is work I guess. I do see a world where I can work hard and get promoted and learn new skills? Haven’t learned anything in the past 5 months aside from some common sense. I still can’t do anything about that “How are you?” question though, why do people insist on asking a question so deeply existential as a basic greeting? How are you? How am I? Who am I? I think I am only a human to myself, but an idea/concept to everyone else and me.
“Nice philosophy, now do your work,” I will have to cope with 40 hours of work. I hope I can still have the energy on the weekends on learning cool things and not be another dead on couch Netflix watcher, even though I think that lifestyle doesn’t look bad but I MUST. I MUST create video games about destroying video games to change my own perception of the world to one where I lived a life.
Art, Games, Resolution
I have been trying out a lot more games for the past year. A part of me feels like I have barely learned anything and haven’t played the “important ones” yet, but I like to believe that I learned a lot of common sense. When I tried to learn game development back when I was 18… Yes my eyes hurting was a huge problem and it still is, but I was completely unaware of “platformer”, “hexagon grid-based games”, I had no idea what anything was and I quit easily.
Recently, I have been helping out a group of game developers from Italy playtest their games. Part of me is very frustrated with my inability to convey my “knowledge” to them, frustrated with their stubbornness and they seem to lack understanding of their own creation… It is kind of crazy that I think I am more knowledgeable when it comes to card games than the developers, I rarely ever feel ego like this and I don’t even consider myself a super dedicated player to the genre yet.
This experience fuels my desire to try to create a game myself again. Joining game journalism, trying out new games, the end goal has always been this, but I always lacked motivation and drive to learn the “hard skills”. My views are extremely limited and I don’t work hard enough at trying out new games and understanding them, but I think now, it is probably more than good enough to focus on other aspects of things. This means I probably will update this blog once a month perhaps when it comes to game analysis.
I need dedication to one thing since my mind is jumping all over the place nowadays. When I played Magic: the Gathering, I played nothing but MtG. If it wasn’t for this kind of dedication, I don’t think I would have learned the game by now. Everything I know about TCGs feels like obvious common sense, but I still remember when I queued up my draft deck into the constructed queue because I thought my draft deck was good at winning (I was Mythic in constructed btw, just proves how meaningless ranks can be lol)
I read Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” and it was such an enlightening read, I recommend it highly to everyone since it really changed the way I look at art in general.
I think I want to dedicate the year 2022 to learning art. For years, I write shitty game ideas on a piece of paper and then leave it behind, but I think being able to convey ideas through art is much more valuable than words.
Thus, I will do nothing but improve my skills in art while maintaining my job. If I can draw, I can at least make real prototypes now. What pulled me into games in the first place is the love for the simple art of Amumu, Veigar, and Twisted Fate, since they reflected how I perceived myself to be inside, and it is a part of the magic that I always ignored when I think about why I love games so much.
My family tends to talk badly about art as if it was some plague because it “doesn’t get you anywhere in life.” I like to think that I need art to be able to breathe, to be able to be human. I don’t really know what kind of art I want to learn, what kind of knowledge I will acquire, how will things look like, but I want to give it a real serious shot.
Back in high school, I was a kid who was so “untalented” at art, I received 60% despite trying my best. There is also this stigma of “can’t teach an old dog new trick”, I would like to think that I have gotten better at learning than ever, and this is my chance to actually do something, real.
What stopped me from pursuing this is that I do everything standing up. The tutorials are based on the assumption that I am sitting and it can feel quite awkward drawing while standing. I didn’t have the right materials since I find it difficult to buy the pens for the sake of “art”, as I wanted to keep this a secret from my mom, or at least I don’t want her to be consciously aware that “this” is what I do.
I think it will be okay. I have a job now. Spending ~$100 on a hobby that will last for years to come will be okay. I am going to work through tutorials and make art. It will be ugly, it will be frustrating, it will be unmotivating at many times as always, but I will make it through and gain something valuable out of it. I will get new perspectives that I never would have had without making this effort. I don’t know how to do this, I don’t know who can help me, but I will do this.
I lack time and education. I will not be anything that resembles a great artist, but at least I will be able to draw something decently. At least I will be able to make art for card games and learn more about how to “think” like a creative. At least I will make an effort.
The mundane 8 hours work, the habitual endless scrolling looking for the next sense of pleasure, the inevitable hollowness. I must evolve. I must change. I can change this time because now I make money, not anything great, but it is something. Health, unexpected mundanity, inevitable dread, through all the problems, I have a lot of free time anyway. I have time for art and have the time to evolve, I am fortunate enough to have this capability and I must make use of it.
Destroying video games… I have been playing games still. Even if I am learning art, I will probably have time to play games but I won’t make it a priority of mine anymore and this blog will probably be a bit more inactive.
I won a mini-tournament a few months ago with a $40 prize of Steam credits. This means I was able to buy games on Steam again! I might have done that ~3 times in my whole life. Tried out two games I bought called System Crash and One Deck Dungeon and… The former was way too grindy and kind of basic, while the latter is kind of difficult to get into but I will try it more later. Either way, I can’t analyze these games the same way I did for Eliza, which I was pretty impressed by. So I think I will make a post talking about a bunch of games together, and discuss its mechanics the same way I did for mobile games sometime later this month.