I have been very irritable lately. Snapping at every thing and everyone. At first I couldn’t really put my finger on it. I just felt like hurting something, a feeling that hasn’t gone a way even after playing a few hours of Modern Warfare 3 and Left 4 Dead 2 on the 360. I mean wow. I snapped at a co-work the other day because he asked a question everyone has been asking me for the last two weeks. Why bother going through with opening this club?
I have been expressing to my close friends how nerve racking its been trying to get this club going. All the rules and paper work I’ve been doing for the last two weeks would make even the best writer cry. On top of that I’ve been having students come complain to me that the clubs not doing anything. I told them I’m working on it but they just huff and puff and say work faster. At this point I lost it. I figured my bad temper had to do with this and not just the crappy days at my first job. But when I lost it on my co-work for questioning why I even bother, I knew this irritation was effecting me more then I wanted to admit.
You see, when our club fell I was waiting for someone else to pick up where we, the failures, had left off. I excepted someone else to pick up the flag and charge into battle calling a war cry and that others would join right behind them. But no one did. In fact all anyone did was complain about everything we did wrong. Why didn’t they just restart the club themselves ?! I was ready to just leave the club as it was, inactive, but then I got to thinking.
This was to good to pass up.
What I mean is that the game industry is big but incredibly tight nit. It seems like everyone knows everyone and word travels fast. Networking is key for success in any industry and the game industry is no exception. To this day I still talk with people from Blizzard and a few free lance Narrative Designers. Plus I have a stack of business cards full of all kinds of people. I have a network started one way or another and a lot of my contacts are students, some of which are now working in game companies or well on their way there. And if that isn’t enough, at one conference I went to I was dragged around by a friend to meet other Narrative designers, one of them being the lead writer of Fallout. Talk about mind blowing! Include the writer for Gearbox’s Brother in Arms and I’d say I’m getting around.
So looking back I thought this is knowledge I’d like to share with everyone. With students trying to look for an in into their favorite company. It’s to good to pass up. So I picked up the flag and charged head long into the nightmare of paperwork and club filing, calling a war cry like no other hoping that others will fall behind me.
So far I have a few people interested. While I’m dodging in coming paper bombs and jumping over trip wires set up to make it almost impossible to start club, I still find myself determine to start something that’ll only benefit my fellow students. I had to learn a lot of stuff on my own, and made a fool out of myself on several occasions like mistaking the creator of Epic Mikey for someone else. Yeah that was a great one. Or the time I went fan girl on a level designer from Naughty Dog, learned not to do that again. Or how about the time a lady from High Voltage Software snapped at me for not knowing the game they created, learned it was Conduit for the Wii pretty quickly.
There are lesson and tricks I want to share, and things I want to learn from others. The club I think is a great way to make that happen. It can also be the start of our own networking, seeing as many of the possible members are graduating soon. So for now I’m just going to keep charging a head screaming like a banshee the entire time and hope by the time I leave someone else will be welling to pick the flag and continue to charge in my stead.
Good for you, you know they always say one person can make a difference.
Love the drawing really accents your frustration.