I currently work in the games industry, and I do so because I once thought of games as my bastion and refuge.
When I was twelve, my family moved, and I started at a new high school. It didn't go well. Like most in the games/tech space, I was a quiet, smart kid, and I hadn't yet learned that putting your hand up in class was social suicide. I went through numerous friend groups who quiety mocked me, ditched me and otherwise made me dread going to school before I found somewhere I fitted in. It was nothing exceptional, but it was tough for me, and the one thing that got me through the day was knowing that when I got home I could boot up Legend of Zelda, return to Hyrule, and be a hero. Someone who was needed, and liked. I could save the world.
While games had always been part of the fabric of my life, they became part of my identity at this point, and I was led down a path that culminated in the realisation that I wanted to give the solace I had found in Zelda to others. I wasn't put off by the naysayers, nor the horribly competitive environment I found myself in at university, and began a professional career in the games industry.
I thought I'd made it, once. I was working on a title that made hundreds of millions within a couple of days of release, well known enough for a colleuge and I to be approached in an airport by excited fans while wearing our dev team shirts. They weren't to know that we were just cogs in the AAA machine. This game didn't feel important to me until I read a reddit post from a man who had lost his wife, and who's son was regressing into himself. The two started playing our game together, and it reconnected them, give them space to begin talking again. That was their 'Zelda moment', so much more profound than mine, and I made me feel like, though I lived at work, and the pressure was killing me, it was worth it.
It wasn't. I left that job, and cycled through a couple of different companies and roles, trying to find a games job that felt meaningful, important, that didn't just feel like a money making machine. I'm in one of the best roles I've had right now, yet I have no passion. Data-driven design, games as a service, and the Exec Producer's insistence that we should make this game good so we can 'all get gold lambos' (we do not, and never have got, sales related bonuses), are killing me. It feels like we're trying to make money, rather than an experience people will enjoy. Perhaps I'm naive, this is a business after all, but I went into the creative industries with the hope that I'd be doing more than just making money for shareholders.
Games still inspire me. Ace Attorney taught me that I don't have be feared to be respected, that my hard-ass, wiz-kid repuation in my old job was hurting me more than helping me. It also taught me that I didn't need to take on the guilt of others. Stardew Valley inspired a love of gardening, the outdoors and living with the seasons, arguably more than my Pagan faith and countryside upbringing.
But that's just not enough.
Our world is dying, the global tempreture is set to rise by three degrees if we don't act now. This is will worsen the pandemics and extreme weather events that we are already seeing, and make parts of the world uninhabitable. And I'm sitting here making video games. Video games that will need massive amounts of servers to run, wasting power just to grab a chip of the market.
I want to help, but I don't have the skills to do so. I have an arts degree and some ruimentary coding skills. To become an ecologist, or a climate scientist, or anything helpful, would mean getting the science qualifications I never got in school, then a second degree. At least five years of schooling at my own expense.
But the small web gives me hope. I've seen websites that run entirley off solar, who purposefully keep files small, who aim to create an arcive of human knowlege in the face of pending collapse. I hope that, in some small way, starting this website is my first step on the path to contribute to a better world.
Maybe I can save the world, for real this time.
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