Brandon the Game Dev

If you’re game developer, you’re an entrepreneur. Even if you’re not in it for money, the amount of physical material, labor, and funding you’ll need to organize to make your game real will make you into an entrepreneur. It’s a scary prospect. Game developers, who specialize in creating products people want but don’t need, are especially vulnerable. As you’d expect, the Internet has capitalized on this fear, and is rife with blogs and thinkpieces ceaselessly extolling the virtues of persistence and hard work. Just take a look at these Google results…

It’s baked into our culture, especially the United States, how important hard work and persistence are. All these articles are just confirming what most of already know. It’s idle palaver that just so happens to generate a lot of ad revenue. You don’t need to learn how to work hard and persist: you need to learn how to be brave.

Hard work and persistence are the results of being highly motivated to do something worthwhile. We procrastinate because we don’t know what to do or because we’re too scared to do it. If it’s direction you lack, here’s a guide on how to find it. If you’re scared, though, that’s a different beast entirely.

If you’re scared, I want you to know two things:

1. I’m scared, too
2. You’re not alone.

Let’s have an honest examination of some of the terrifying things about game development.

• Any creative endeavor opens up a part of you to the world you probably haven’t shared before.
• Criticism can take the wind out of your sails really quickly, whether they’re valid complaints or whining from gamers who didn’t read the rules.
• Critics themselves can be anyone: friends, family, people on the Internet with 50,000 YouTube subscribers, random fly-by-night trolls who go around giving 1s on BoardGameGeek.
• You’re probably going to be dealing with a lot of money. You might lose quite a bit.
• If you plan on taking your idea to Kickstarter, that’s a tough road for first timers.
• You can do everything right and still not please people.
• You have to learn a lot of skills from scratch, including product testing, marketing and promotion, accounting, and fulfillment.

I could go on for a long time, but you get the point. There’s a lot of very valid things to be afraid of.

Don’t squash your fears. Spell them out. Write them down and look at them with honesty and sober understanding. Being brave is not about being fearless, it’s about understanding the nature of your fears and facing them with dignity. Fear is often what stops us before we reach true greatness. No amount of rattled-off platitudes about putting in 70 hour weeks or doing the same thing for 10 years until you get your big break will sate these fears. We face our fears through self-reflection first and persistence second.

You can do this. I believe in you.

Creativity is painful. It’s hard to make something worthwhile, to put your name on a product, to cast your work out into the world for judgment by people who don’t care nearly as much as you. When your heart is wrapped up so tightly in what you do, the smallest criticism can feel like a kick in the chest.

That’s Narrative screwing with you.

Broadly speaking, our experience of the world is a mix of what actually happens to us (Reality) and how we react to it (Narrative). As a metaphor, consider someone who is out of shape who starts running for the first time. During the 11 or 12 minutes in which she begins to run that first mile, she’ll feel a lot of pain – a burning in her chest as lungs struggle for oxygen, legs aching from muscles not often used. The pain is screaming “you’re hurting yourself, you’re hurting yourself!” That pain is Narrative. However, the Reality is that she’s bettering herself. For her to continue, she must realize that the Narrative and Reality aren’t matching up. If she wishes to succeed, she must react to Reality, not Narrative.

Before my second Kickstarter for War Co., I sent out copies of the game to over a dozen reviewers. Eight of them reviewed the game in time for the campaign, and seven were positive. In Reality, War Co. was at least enough of a crowd-pleaser to succeed at crowdfunding. Yet my Narrative was pre-occupied with the one mixed review. Yeah, it wasn’t even a negative review, just a mixed one. That’s absurd, isn’t it? From an objective standpoint, my Narrative was absurd, but I was reacting to it until I sat down and talked myself back to Reality.

You’ll probably start out naive and get your butt handed to you. It’s a rite of passage. You’ll eventually work your way up to where your Reality is far better than the Narrative you tell yourself. Once you reach a certain point in your creative projects, the biggest problem is quite likely to be your own inner demons – your Narrative gone awry.

The most corrosive thought to ever threaten the creative soul is deceptively simple: “I am a fraud.” High-achieving students, artists, and business professionals alike find themselves believing these false words. The sense that you are pretending to be as talented as others is so prevalent that it has a term: impostor syndrome. Experiencing the feeling that everyone around you is better than you is almost like a rite of passage. I’ve been through it, as have many, many talented game designers, writers, artists, and CEOs.

Academics and journalists have kicked ideas back and forth, trying to zero in on the root of impostor syndrome. Scratching their heads, they say “why do talented folks feel like frauds?” I’ve not found anything conclusive yet online, so I’ll posit my own ideas in lieu of the absence of others’.

Creativity is seen as a magical black box from the outside looking in. Few people think about how it feels to be Stephen King making every keystroke for his many novels. Few people think about how it feels to be Pablo Picasso making every single brushstroke in Guernica. When you start creating something on your own, the mysticism fades away into the banal reality of simple steps.

Making a board game involves hundreds of play tests and a lot of subtle tweaks. Writing is a bunch of outlining and proofreading. Painting is a series of minute hand movements to delicately introduce oil to canvas. Taking a long road trip is a long chain of gentle steering wheel movements, toe taps on the gas and brake pedals, mirror checking, GPS setting, radio fiddling, gasoline purchasing, and coffee drinking. When you break down big goals into tiny steps, it’s easy to say “anybody could do this!”

To some degree, I agree with that statement. Anybody who clearly defines their goals, takes time to reach them, and reiterates their work until they get it right can do almost anything they want. Here’s the truth of it, though: hardly anybody puts in that effort. If you’re reading this blog, there’s a good chance that you’ve at least started creating a game (or other creative project). Awesome! You’re already doing far better than most people.

Yes, it takes an enormous amount of work to make something worth making. Yes, it’s a long, difficult road that will require a lot of rework. Every once in a while, though, think about what you’ve done right. Give yourself a pat on the back for getting as far as you have. You’ll need self-compassion to compel yourself to finish the rest of the hard work, to travel the rest of the long road. Remember that even the most magical creation in the world was made through a lot of un-sexy work. Even the dullest work you do might create “magic”.

You’re not a fraud.

You can do it.

Keep the magic alive.