Telltale was a natural fit for me, and I’ve been really happy there. The people are amazing, and I was given an opportunity to do the kinds of research at which I’m best. And make really cool stuff! It’s awesome work.
Last October I announced my triumphant return to this blog and to Twitter. My life was stabilizing, I promised. And with that stability would come a Return to The Internet.
It’s funny how things work out.
Two weeks later, I was laid off from the job I had just publicly declared my love for. “A natural fit” for my skills, I had called it. And it really was. The team was doing really cool, innovative stuff. But alas, Telltale laid off a huge chunk of its workforce, and the R&D team with it. It was a real shame. It also upended my life.
Thankfully, I was immediately approached by several other game companies, and after much consideration I took another R&D job on an incubator team at Hangar 13, a 2K Games studio. This position was another great fit, a cool project that promised to use my skills well. Unfortunately, I was only there 11 days when Hangar 13 also cut a huge portion of their staff, and my team with it.
The second layoff put the first in perspective. I had loved my job at Telltale, which made the layoff feel like a personal failure, even though the logical part of me knew it wasn’t—there was a new CEO; I was on a risky, ambitious project; etc. etc. But the Hangar 13 situation was so ludicrously impersonal, it forced me to reconsider my feelings. There really was no way my Hangar layoff could be my fault—after all, I was still learning my coworkers’ names and getting IT access to things!—which made the Telltale cuts sting less. This is just what working in games is. But all of it meant more instability. And sadly this blog was too much to manage during that time.
In some ways, I went from starry-eyed designer to grizzled, cynical industry vet over the span of 3 months, and I had the battle scars to prove it. After all of that, I couldn’t find the motivation to jump back into AAA development. I still can’t. I feel like a different person now, my eyes opened in a way they weren’t before. I can’t get excited about the same things, and truthfully, some of the magic of games is gone for me.
But in other ways I’ve gained a lot. I understand the industry as a whole better than I ever did. I can see fears and trends in the business decisions studios make. I have a new intuition for how publishers and investors will see dollar amounts in certain mechanics or design paradigms. I can see that the industry is in a pivotal shift in a way I didn’t recognize before, and that with that shift, the AAA narrative as we know it is in very real trouble.
Rather than fight the winds of change, I have opted to return to academia full-time for the next year, where I can control my own destiny and pursue research on new forms of narrative in a less tumultuous environment. I’m working on a new procedural system with some very smart collaborators, and over the next year we’ll be making a game with it. Unlike industry research, I’m actually able to report my progress here. And with this return comes a broader Return to The Internet in general, the one I hoped to make back in November.
I had my first stream in almost 2 years tonight. Knowing the first stream back is the hardest, I actually held a pre-stream stream on Monday for an intimate audience to answer questions and talk about where I’d been. I was incredibly grateful to get some of the jitters out Monday, but the real test was live-critiquing a game. And honestly today’s first stream of Detroit: Become Human was hard. I had technical issues which ate into the stream. I was nervous in a way I’m normally not. I wasn’t on my analysis game in the way I normally am.
But I did it. I got past the first real stream. And with this post I’ll be past the first blog post back too.
I’m here—back on my feet. And hopefully this time it’ll stick.
