On Being a Full Time Game Designer

For the last eight weeks, I had the privilege of being paid money to make board games as my “day job”. Since I’ve already spent too much time designing games in my free time, I relished the opportunity to make this craft the centerpiece of my weekdays.

I was hired as a part of an entrepreneurship fellowship at my alma mater, Haverford College, which meant that I was tasked with not only designing games, but also forming and pitching business proposals to venture capitalists.

If you know me at all, you can probably guess which of the two I liked more.

But even the design process lost a bit of its luster when it was shoved into the nine-to-five spotlight; since my design time was so heavily concentrated, I felt like I had to push through failed tests with brutelike force, repeatedly tweaking and testing each afternoon. The games had no room to breathe.

If progress was linear, this strategy would have worked wonders. But instead my designs floundered, and I was frustrated. I thought that this was my dream job, yet all I could do was move sideways.

I’m incredibly grateful for the chance to “go full time,” but I think that label hampered my creativity this summer. It brought with it the baggage of restricted hours, the pressure of producing something both good and fast (you can really only force one), and the notion that this thing I did for fun is now “work”.

I’m sure there’s strategies I could have taken to make the summer more fun and/or successful, and that I put some of these restrictions and stressors on myself, but I’m nonetheless excited to see them go.

And that’s okay. Not every dream needs to be a dream job.