by Alex Langley
GAMES CAN BE MORE THAN WAYS TO PASS THE TIME
With most games, I will watch the first handful of cutscenes to see if the writing quality in the game is worth my time. Far more often than not, I’ll end up skipping most of the subsequent cutscenes because the writing is garbage, so who cares?
Far too few game designers are concerned with making a good story, instead satisfying themselves with being a platform through which big companies can entice customers into making repeat purchases. Games can be art; make yours a masterpiece.
KEEP YOUR PLAYERS FOCUSED
Few things feel crappier, as a DM, than crafting what you think is going to be an awesome encounter, only to look around and see unengaged players.
Anticipate what your players will think; keep them focused on whatever is most engaging. Listen to their feedback and incorporate it into your game.
LET YOUR PLAYERS SUCCEED
A game can be soul-crushingly hard but still fun to play so long as you give players a sense of success, even if the success is as small as “I made it three steps past that dragon that keeps killing me!” The Dark Souls series, famous for its tagline “Prepare to die,” has a devoted fanbase thanks to providing a sense of satisfaction to players even when they inevitably die. A player succeeds if they’re satisfied with a feeling of progress, not necessarily just when they beat a boss or conquer a level.
COUNT ON YOURSELF FIRST, COUNT ON YOURSELF LAST
Other people are notoriously unreliable.* They will often have good intentions and may get very excited at the prospect of working on a game. Ultimately, though, you are the most reliable person you have. Share the work when you can, make plenty of backups and contingency plans in case someone falls through or wigs out and runs off with your data, and go into your project with the knowledge that you are probably going to be doing the bulk of the work yourself.
STUDY GAMES
Read books and articles about game design. Think critically about the games you play, analyzing what works and doesn’t work. Attend lectures (or watch virtual lectures). Like any creative field, making good games means you will need to put time and effort into figuring out what makes something good.
AVOID THE PLAGIARISM PLAGUE
Don’t use other people’s code without their permission in a game you’re trying to make money from. That is—say it with me, class—stealing!
THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE: CROWDFUNDING THE GAME YOU’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO MAKE
While the game industry is very much alive and well, things have changed. Crowdfunding has given freedom to game-makers in a way we’ve never seen before. Small studios like Yacht Club Games (Shovel Knight), famous developers such as Koji Igarashi (Castlevania producer, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night) and Keiji Inafune (Mega Man producer, Mighty No. 9), and indie developers who have no previous major experience (Matthew Inman, Exploding Kittens) have all used crowdfunding to great success.
So how can you get your game successfully funded? The easiest way is to be independently wealthy already and pay for it yourself; barring that, you could also try being famous or owning the rights to make a sequel to an established property. Or, I guess if you want to do things the hard way by not already being rich and famous, there are a few ways to up the odds of successful crowdfunding.
1. Make a polished proof-of-concept design. Having a great idea won’t get you money; you need to show your audience that you know how to translate that good idea into a palpable reality. In your crowdfunding video, show a placeholder version of your game in action. Hire a good artist (or con a friend) into creating good concept art to go along with your crowdfunding campaign to give potential backers an idea of what the finished concept is going to be.
2. Perfect your crowdfunding video. The term elevator pitch refers to the lightning-fast description you would use to pitch your book/movie/series idea to a producer or publisher if you should be so lucky as to get in an elevator with them. Your crowdfunding video is an elevator pitch, and the producers are the entire Internet. Make your video perfect and professional to show the world that you have the dream, the energy to get it accomplished, and the foresight to plan smartly; show that all you’re lacking is the capital to get started.
3. Reach out to gaming publications. The Internet is littered with gaming blogs and sites. Contact their writers and editors about your campaign with a professional, yet entertaining, e-mail. Get them interested, and they’ll get their readers interested.
4. Be prepared to spend a lot of time managing things during your crowdfunding campaign. Crowdfunding makes for a nerve-wracking month or two. You can’t leave your campaign running without supervision; you’ll need to check and manage it constantly. Crowdfunding campaigns are less “house cat” and more “newborn baby.”
5. Utilize social media. As with all livings nerdy, make use of social media to advertise your game and crowdfunding campaign. If you’ve got any favors with people who have a big audience, call them in to get them to help pitch you. Also, connect with people. Follow the comments and interact with those who have questions or who are interested in your game. The Internet’s not just a place for people to yell slurs at one another; sometimes it’s a place where strangers can chat and have a nice time.
After all this, let me end this chapter with the warning that game-making can be a harsh, stressful field. The video game industry is infamous for the ludicrous amount of unpaid extra hours its employees are expected to work when products are behind schedule (which they always are) or close to shipping. Tabletop games, though their popularity has certainly increased in recent years, are still a somewhat more niche market and therefore harder to break into and stay successful in. If game-making is your passion, however, no amount of crunch time or niche-ness can stop you.
For some of you, maybe game-making isn’t your true passion. In fact, just reading this chapter has made you realize that you, against all odds, like your current job. With that in mind, let’s step back from focusing on breaking into new jobs and instead discuss ways of making your current gig a little more fun and a lot more nerdy.
CHAPTER SIX
BRINGING UNCONVENTIONAL NERDINESS TO CONVENTIONAL CAREERS
Playing video games for a living, web-streaming live shows, and cosplaying as fictional characters are as nontraditional as careers get. For some folks, however, their passion lies in older types of careers, yet they still also crave a way to infuse their love of nerdiness into these non-nerdy jobs. Great! If you’ve got a job you love, no matter what it is, enjoy it!*
The most obvious traditional career to infuse nerdiness into would be academia. Academics are the original nerds—analyzing and obsessing over their fields of study to gain exceptional levels of understanding. Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson has a profound love of the cosmos, and by blending pop culture with science he acts as a scientific ambassador to get people interested.
Danica McKellar, in addition to her many acting credits that include The Wonder Years, Young Justice, and Project MC2, has used her considerable mathematical skills to author a book series that breaks difficult mathematical concepts down in math newbie–friendly ways. McKellar’s books are for everyone who could use a little extra help with math, but they also have an extra emphasis on encouraging girls to understand and appreciate the wacky world of numbers, as girls are all too often discouraged from STEM fields.
Outside the academic sector, there are still plenty of options to meld nerdiness with business; all it takes is for you to put your big mind to it.
WORDS FROM WORKING NERDS
Psychologist DR. TRAVIS LANGLEY is a lifelong nerd (and my dad) who melded his love of psychology with his love of popular culture in his Psychology of Fiction series, with entries such as The Walking Dead Psychology: Psych of the Living Dead, Star Wars Psychology: the Dark Side of the Mind, and Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight.
Since third grade, I knew I had to write. Whether I was going to become a journalist or novelist or comic book writer, I wou
ld become an author. And I was always fascinated with storytelling—both fiction and nonfiction. We learn through stories. We share human experience through stories. I wanted to write, and I wanted to understand people. In fourth grade I checked a psychology book out from the library. I didn’t understand much of it, but, by gosh, I tried.
By the time I became a professor, I didn’t want to write a textbook. I wanted to tell stories. I used to think of the academic side of my life and the author side as two separate things. Once these two tracks merged and became the same thing, it was the truest to myself I’d ever felt. There was no longer this other part of me that I didn’t share at the office. I’m the professor who wrote a book on the psychology of Batman. That’s still what I’m best known for, and that feels pretty darn good. It’s a long way from being a kid who loved heroic fiction, especially comic books, and had no peers to discuss that with.
What inspired you to incorporate nerdy elements into your work?
First, a communication professor at my university named Randy Duncan paved the way, uniting the scholarly and the nerdy by teaching a course on comics as communication, working on a textbook about that, advising a comic book–lovers club, getting our library to build an impressive graphic novel collection, and bringing creators to speak at our university as guests. When he took a group of our students to visit the offices of DC Comics, my son Nicholas and I went along with them.
A lot of things came together one summer ten years ago. I taught a course on psychology in literature for the first time. Among the many readings, I assigned one comic book issue and one graphic novel. Each student had to choose one fictional character to analyze in many different ways—Hamlet, Captain Ahab, Moll Flanders—and to show them how to do the tasks, I did them myself with Batman as the example. That same summer, I attended the Comics Arts Conference, a scholarly set of panels at San Diego Comic-Con, because I wanted to see Nicholas on a panel about student research. Something I wrote for that same conference later became a journal article and eventually laid the foundation for a book, Captain America vs. Iron Man. On my way to Comic-Con, I read a book by Danny Fingeroth, Superman on the Couch, which made me think “I want to write this kind of book.” At Comic-Con, I saw people animated, invigorated by the celebration of interests that make them feel ostracized [at] other places in their lives. I met comics scholars. I knew I needed to write a journal article about Batman. Within a year, I knew I needed to write a book about Batman.
Who or what are your inspirations?
My sons. I got involved in comic cons to help them find and follow their passions, and that changed the course of mine. Their mom—my wife, Rebecca—gives me insight and makes me laugh. Find inspiration around you, and be inspired for their sakes.
Randy Duncan and Danny Fingeroth [are inspirations], for reasons I mentioned. Michael Uslan developed the first course on comics as folklore at an accredited university and went on to become the first doctor of comic books and the executive producer of the Batman movies. Gail Simone was a hairdresser whose passion led her to become one of the most successful comic book writers today. It’s been an honor to get to know them all. Psychologist William Moulton Marston inspires me because he managed to make contributions in the field of psychology and to create Wonder Woman, and his granddaughter Christie inspires me with everything she has built to help people from around the world connect and share their love of that character.
Passion transcends topics. One of the wonderful things about a fan convention is that you and someone you just met might share the same interests, or you might have completely different interests but still understand each other’s passion.
The fervor of people who build and craft fascinates me. So many devoted cosplayers invest time and love bringing costume creations to life. People who work in special effects like Eliot Sirota and Fon Davis, a propmaker such as Bill Doran, the furniture maker who reupholstered my grandparents’ chairs, and a lot of people you might be interviewing for this book—they’re making things. Some make money at it. Even those who don’t can live more fully for it. They earn emotional wealth. Money’s just numbers.
These individuals do not settle for drudging along through this existence. Even if it doesn’t always feel like it, they live.
What tips do you have for anyone looking to incorporate their nerdy loves into their less-nerdy jobs?
Find your people. Find your passion. Find what you love in life and celebrate it. Maybe you can’t be open about it in one setting, like your place of work, but find somewhere else where you can be. If you can be open at work, maybe by doing something as simple as hanging a Star Wars calendar on your wall, you’ll likely find that there are others around who’d love to talk about Star Wars, too. Because I’m open to the whole world about my interests, there are faculty and staff members I cross paths with who strike up conversations with me about The Walking Dead, Star Trek, and comic book movies. Sometimes you have to conceal it at work because you’re not working around people who will understand, but the sooner you can treat it as no big deal, the truer to yourself you’ll feel.
BE CREATIVE ANYWHERE, NO MATTER HOW SMALL THAT PLACE MAY BE
At a butcher’s shop, shape a pile of beef into the Death Star to let people know you’re running a special for Alderaan Memorial Day.* If you work anywhere with a dry-erase board, go nuts with the nerdy fan art. It’ll give you a chance to flex your artistic skills, and it may get some attention online.
INFLUENCE PRODUCT SELECTION
If you work where you have a say in what gets stocked, try to stock some products that align with your interests. If you work in a bookstore, work on expanding the selection of manga and graphic novels. If you work at a clothing store, see if you can get in a few T-shirts with some robots or X-people on ’em.
MAKE A NERDY VERSION OF NON-NERDY ENTERTAINMENT AND NON-NERDY BUSINESSES
Thanks to nerd culture’s spread into mainstream culture, we’ve seen a rise in people finding new and interesting ways to express their nerdiness. There are burlesque shows such as D20 Burlesque and Nerd Girl Burlesque. There are also bands like Okilly Dokilly, a Ned Flanders–themed metal band; the Klingon death-metal band, Stovakor; the McDonald’s-themed Black Sabbath group, Mac Sabbath; and countless other musical groups who build their style and sound from science, gaming, and popular culture.
As seen in the film Trekkies, dentist Dennis Bourguignon and his wife Shelly modified their dental practice to give it a Star Trek flair. This satisfied both their love of science fiction and their desire to portray dentists as “good-doers.” There’s the Doctor Who–themed Pandorica in Beacon, New York; Los Angeles’s Library Bar, which mixes heavy drinking with heavy reading; New York City’s haunted house–esque Jekyll & Hyde Club; and many other such entertaining eateries and establishments.
Nerdy businesses are a little harder to get off the ground, given that they’re focusing on a more niche experience, but the only way to truly fail at doing something is to never try in the first place.
START A CLUB
Your office may not be a nerdy place, but if your workplace is large enough, there could be a few other folks who would like to talk about live-streaming games, Dungeons & Dragons, which of the crystal gems on Steven Universe is the best dancer,* etc. Be the brave soul to put yourself out there with a pamphlet and a reserved room to transform the occasional lunchtime into a moment to recharge your nerdy batteries with like-minded peeps. At my alma mater, Henderson State University, the pop culture–themed club Legion of Nerds quickly became the largest organization on campus after its inception—after I’d already graduated, alas.
UNCOVER A VAST CONSPIRACY
It takes some seriously nerdy work to find the various connections between seemingly random people, places, and events, and then to cover several walls in newspaper clippings, online articles, and photographs tied together with red string. Your work may suffer; that doesn’t matter anymore, not now that you’ve realized just how deep this whole thing go
es.
FOSTER A HATRED FOR YOUR JOB SO INTENSE THAT YOU LOSE TOUCH WITH SANITY COMPLETELY
This job sucks. You should instead go to work as your Dungeons & Dragons character. Summon a big hairy demon for some laughs. Bark at the moon. Speak only in R’lyehian. Dehumanize yourself and face to bloodshed.
RETURN FROM THE BRINK OF MADNESS AND FIND A NEW JOB IF YOU DON’T LIKE YOUR CURRENT GIG
Orrrrr maybe take a breather, calm down, and figure some things out instead of going full-on banaynays.
Developmental psychologist Erik Erikson’s research led him to theorize that human beings go through specific psychosocial crises during specific times of life. As teens and young adults, we’re in a stage of identity vs. role confusion, trying to ascertain who we are, where we fit in, what we want to be, and all those other questions that keep us up at night. By exploring multiple venues of identity while we’re young, Erikson believed we could come to a healthy conclusion about the self. So, basically, explore your options!
Erikson posited that, as we reach middle age, humans go through generativity vs. stagnation. During this stage, we take stock of our lives to determine whether we feel we’re being generative—building things that give us a sense of purpose—or stagnant—stuck in a place we don’t want to be. Now whether middle-aged or not, stagnation isn’t something anyone wants to experience; we want to know our lives have meaning, that we’re doing more than toiling away every day to keep our bodies functioning.