I Love My Job

I had a great day today.  And it was at work.  I love my job.

My work on the PC build of Dragon Age was more or less completed today.  Been a long haul, and come a long way since I started.  It’s been an amazing experience being a part of the project, and seeing the game come along.  And now I’m on to consoles, with a whole new slew of bugs to find and file!  I’m excited.  There hasn’t been a ton of extra work for me to pick up on the PC build the past month since it' was more or less complete, but there should be no short supply of extra tasks available to me now!  And maybe we’ll crunch again, get some overtime hours!

Most of the day we were running updaters to prepare for our work on consoles on Monday, so for a good chunk of the day we couldn’t use our computers for anything but browsing the net, but couldn’t leave them because we had to babysit the updaters.  My boss literally said “Don’t do any work, just browse the net and stuff, but don’t leave your computer”.  So I just sat in the room with the other guys in my office, Reid, Dave, Martin, Scott and Owen.  We ended up in some deep philosophical conversation, some great gamer talk, etc. 

When Zac, my boss, came back there was still nothing anyone could do so he just joined in on our gamer talk.  We talked about how Shadow of the Colossus was a breakthrough in minimalistic storytelling in gaming, whether or not Fallout 3 was a true open-world game, the age-old pc-vs-console debate, how piracy is leading the industry to favour the micro-payments economics model, how console services like Xbox Live Arcade are bringing back independent gaming and nostalgia gaming, and more.  I was getting paid the whole time, and the whole conversation was considered “talking shop”.  I LOVE my job.

I wanted to do something productive though, so at the end of the day, once the updaters were done, I helped one of my co-workers with some of his assignments, and managed to get a fair amount of work done.

Tonight I decided to take it easy and just bunkered down in my room and beat Dead Space on 360.  I’m on a mission to get up my gamerscore so I recently beat Wanted, and now Dead Space.  It was a great game, with an epic last boss!

You know you have the right job when the line between your job and home life is seriously blurred.

It’s not that there’s no work, there is.  But I love the work.  I take on as many extra tasks as I can, I love being as integrated as possible and being a part of the project, part of a team.  I love the milestones, watching day by day, week by week and month by month, a project make observable progress and to know I had something to do with that.  I love knowing gamers around the world, gamers just like me, will play this final product and hopefully love it.  And I love knowing my name is in the credits to something I’m proud to be a part of.

It may sound silly to someone not into gaming, but to me, someone who’s been playing videogames his whole life, watched the industry grow, seen it mature from a hobby, to a mass form of entertainment, and now beginning to transcend into an art form…  Well it’s cool to be a part of this, regardless of my small role in it all.  I feel like in my own tiny way, I’m leaving a mark on the world.