This week, I learned (or am starting to learn) several things: Work-life balance, the power of friendship, how to share with enthusiasm, how to reserve your mojo, and how to be a good conversationalist. Let’s break ‘em down one at a time…
Work-life Balance: The job’s awesomely fun. I think I’ve established that pretty firmly. However, you can get too much of a good thing. Even though I’m salaried, my boss has asked me to cut back a little, and I have to agree with him. In weeks four and five, I accumulated 99 hours – nine extra hours in each week. This would explain why I haven’t been getting dishes done at home, some prep work done for Protospiel South, or had time to advance my personal gaming projects (Inevitable) to the extent I’d like to.
Lesson learned: Reserve a little more time for my sweetie and me.
The Power of Friendship: Thursday was playtest night. It was also tax day (the 15th) and rainy/thunderstormy. I suspected that attendance would be low, and we had games that really needed playtesting. I contacted the folks I game with on Tuesday nights and invited them to playtest.
Note that this is something I’ve avoided doing for two reasons: (1) I don’t want to seem like I’m showing off. “Hey, lookit my nifty job! Lookit me! Me-me-me!” It just seems gauche. (2) I want to keep personal life and work life at least a little compartmentalized. That’s why I haven’t brought playtest games to Tuesday night gaming. I think it’d be rude to use my friends as my personal batch of game-playing guinea pigs.
Their response was overwhelmingly positive. I was very happy to have them there. We had 16 attendees, and only six of those were SJG employees. That’s a really good ratio; much better than the usual 1:1. As things wrapped up, several of them asked to be included in the weekly playtest announcements.
Lesson learned: Friends like you and want to help you. Things you think are fun, they’re also likely to think are fun.
Sharing With Enthusiasm: When I tell friends and acquaintances what I do, they often respond with, “That’s so cool!” Lately, my reply has been a muted, “Yeah. It’s pretty neat.” In part, I’m understated because I’ve gotten a little used to it, but mostly I’m just not trying to be a jerk. I figure that if I’m not hyper-exuberant about it, I won’t look pompous. I suspect that’s not really what people want to see. I think that people like to see others get happy and excited about things.
Lesson learned: It’s okay to continue to be excited about my job and to share that excitement with other people when I’m talking about it.
Reserving Your Mojo: This ties in to work-life balance, above. Yesterday, a friend asked me if I’ve been working on my own games. I realized, with more than a little surprise, that I really hadn’t. Sure, I’ve been communicating with Jeremy about Inevitable, but that’s really the extent of it. I haven’t done any additional work on Ninja Golf or any of the other projects I was working on before woking at SJG.
To be fair to myself, I am working on Protospiel South 2010, which will take more and more of my spare cycles until it takes place on May 28, 29, and 30. Even so, development of my other personal projects has ground to a standstill. I’m making great progress on my projects at SJG, so I still get to be creative. It’s just not on my own stuff. This creates an interesting… Dilemma isn’t the word I’d use to describe it. That makes it sound too dramatic. Even “conflict” is too hard a term. Let’s call it a mild dissonance. I’m used to advancing my own projects, and that’s not happening right now.
Lesson learned: Work-life balance is important. When things realign, reserve some time for your own projects, as well as work.
Being a Good Conversationalist: This blog (or this series of entires, at the very least) epitomizes this emerging problem. I’m talking about myself too much and not listening to others as much as I’d like to. However, I also really like to share what’s going on in my life. This is neat stuff! I need to figure out how to balance these two things.
Lesson learned: Actually, I haven’t “learned” this one yet. It’s just something I need to pay attention to and figure out. For this blog, at least, I’m going to start taking notes as I work for factoids that will be useful to y’all.
— Jonathan A Leistiko :: thought : gaming
Invisible City Productions is a collective of game designers, writers, and artists who provide this as a space for the creators of secret media to come together and touch antennae.
I really like the introspective posts and am also very interested in hearing about life as a game, what, Shepard?
You are obviously excited about your new gig and the over-work indulgence is par for the course. Glad to see you are self re-balancing. I second keeping the enthusiasm. Own the fact that you have a job others are jealous over. It’s OK and your friends can live vicariously through you.
— Kevin Miller Apr 20, 09:02 PM #