My First Foray
So, hi. I’m K. I think for the sake of internet’s sake, I’ll just leave my name like that for now. Essentially, I am starting this blog with the aim of having a digital archive of my experiences, lessons, trials, tribulations and whatnot about my dive into my third (and hopefully last) career change.
I’ll posit some burning questions I may have and to whomever– if anyone that reads this– knows the answer, I would be indebted to you if you responded.
I will have art, ideas, development notes, personal anecdotes that I’ll share with you as well.
Why Video Games:
Well, to simply explain my personality, here is a TEDtalk I encourage anyone who feels stuck in a career where you don’t know why you don’t like it and you’re good at it, or you are bored and you can’t figure out why, or you just don’t understand why you can’t be happy to be where you are in a career….
Basically, I hate to self-identify for many reasons, however this is a rare instance of that analogy of the lightbulb going off: I came across the aforementioned video in pretty much my ruttiest-rut of a career moment and it reframed how I was looking at my options–more importantly: what to look for. I resonated with everything she said in her talk: I like challenges but once I achieve them, I get bored if I have to repeat the same task over and over | I need to keep my brain constantly innovating, creating, and stimulated in order to maintain a happy status-quo, so, where do all of those needs point to?
Easy: Video Games.
I’ve been playing video games all the way back to the NES with Super Mario Bros (who hasn’t who’s in my age bracket?). I was inspired by the Donkey Kong Country 2 soundtrack going, “wow” as a kid because it was so cool. When the Playstation came out and I was battling friends on Tekken 2, the opening cinematic was so very 90′s but so so so awesome (1990′s bad ass character montage with a techno soundtrack, anyone?). The Playstation 2 offered the first game that I became emotionally invested in: Kingdom Hearts, and also the scariest gaming experience I’ve ever encountered: Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly. The GameCube ushered in my love of the Resident Evil franchise with the epic Resident Evil 4 (and first digital character crush: Leon, because: that hair). The PS3 offered an insight to adventure with the Uncharted series directed by the immensely talented Amy Hennig who I look up to as the godmother of game directors. The Mass Effect Trilogy showed players on mass scale (no pun intended) the mechanical innovation of choice (note: ignore the ending of ME3 everyone). Now we have the Playstation 4 and XBOXOne and the Nintendo Switch that offers an extensive platform outreach to the indie game community–game developers have the access points for publishing that they have craved for so long with the advent of these consoles (I’m excluding conversations on PC games solely due to my lack of extensive experience with them).
Video games offer an unprecedented amount of creative collaboration, engineering, and cross-industry professionals….options are endless in this industry and it’s only getting bigger with the advent of ‘working’ VR and AR. What will the next curve in this industry be and how will it be commercialized? How will it be accessible? These questions are open-ended which means I get to have constant challenges, learning curves, and most importantly: be engaged through and through.
Now…..what?
Well, I’ll fill you in on the next post. For now, the journey continues.