Well That Ruined My Day

I'm gonna be terribly straightforward with you, void that is the internet, continuously witnessing the plight of those who have the ability to carve out niches and create, is doing the opposite of wonders for my anxiety of what's to come for people like me.

I have long accepted that what I think, what I do, and what I am at large are never going to be deemed the norm in society. I am an anarchist after all, HAHA! I know I'm not someone who is palatable, and relatable to most, neurodivergence aside. I have always found it hard to keep a conventional desk job: I tried to off myself the last time I got so badly burned out from one. I yearn to create freely, learn endlessly, and experience life and art deeply. I yearn to think to create, to create to think. Of these things, I am no longer ashamed to admit. I also know that being such as myself is too often branded as too romantic, too idealistic. The small voice from the dark recesses of my brain call me such too, but I dare tell it that I just have an expansive imagination. It is a tedious but enriching life, getting to work on a project that allows me such freedoms, one that I would not trade anything in the world for. The material reality of all this however, and all those who live a life such as mine, is almost dehumanizing. More often than not, the hours are longer, the effort much more immense, than those of who have more stable careers. Passion is expected to keep the machinery going, and if that burns you out, keeps you out of commission for a while, you're supposed to just deal with it without a safety net. These same hands that dare create, and imagine something new, are ignored, even swatted away, when we try to reach out when we're drowning.

"A skeptic might say there's no need to compare oneself to others. But when you are attempting to figure out a career in a profession that doesn't exist, comparisons are useful, even necessary, because they clue you in to the fact that your struggles might be as much the result of structural obstacles as purely personal stumbles."

I came across a tweet bearing a screenshot from an article, something alongside a writer experiencing waiting tables for the first time at 52. I clicked through the tweet and found this article. As if the anxieties of being a game designer for an ambitious TRPG project in this archipelago isn't enough, I read through it. Maybe doing that while trying to recover from burnout was a mistake.

It was a symposium article entitled The Profession That Does Not Exist.

It opened with "Writing won’t make you a living"

Of course as someone whose profession does require me to write every now and then, I let out the biggest sigh and prepared myself to read it.

There is certainly some solace in reading stories of those who held on to their craft, insisting upon it despite the crushing boot of capitalism but it is not lost however, how dire things are for those who dared to keep on creating. It makes me anxious, and has probably ruined my day (or week, or month), as someone whose existence, and living relies so heavily in the act of creation, and I don't even share the same profession (nor am I from North America).

What is a game designer anyway? It's in the name itself, you design games. It sounds like a fake job, because if you think about it, it is. What it is actually is an umbrella for all the jobs you do to design games: A researcher, a writer, an editor, a graphic designer, sometimes an illustrator, and I'm sure there's so much more. Despite the amount of hats you wear, and the skills you have to amass, it remains a niche profession choice, reserved only for those who might be called sickos. Friend of the GB team, Liana McKenzie, has said before that it's even niche in the US, where there is more or less an industry for physical games. For this archipelago? Well, I am shaking in my boots for a reason.

Do not get me wrong, working on Gubat Banwa with the team has been one of the most fulfilling things in my life in a lot of aspects. Beyond that, it is the most ambitious TRPG to have come out of SEA (Tan Shao Han's words not mine) if not also the most labor intensive. Every mechanic, every illustration, every designed graphic, a thesis unto itself. I always tell myself that it's all going to be worth it, because the process of it does remind me from time to time of why we do this. But the article has planted the idea of a foreboding future in my mind, and its proving difficult to uproot from my mind when we're already considered unconventional for the game's rejection of nationalistic ideals. Not once did we ever use "Filipino" to market this game, because it is not. National (and honestly, the regional ones too) efforts, and agencies, whether from the government or not, are unable to comprehend Gubat Banwa in a variety of different ways. We cannot ask for local grants most of the time because a game design studio focusing on physical games are unheard of and thus, no category exists for it. We cannot enter region-specific design contests because we are a Pan-Philippine team. We are of Cebu, Bikol, Manila, Iligan, Laguna, Pangasinan, and everywhere else. We are an anomaly within an anomaly. So please, forgive me if I fear for the future when we are working within the ideas of a better one, yet the present continues to reject us.

I want us to succeed, and I want it to last for our lifetimes. I want to keep doing what we do. Institutions of domination push for all us to seek, and yearn for beauty and authenticity, often by the western chauvinist standards, separate from the hands that create, and the labor it entails. I fear for the uncaring world that refuses to part the curtain, to witness that all art is not possible without the toiling hands of artists. And yet, I dream of a world, among many worlds, where we can all create freely and live, not survive. I will just have to contend with all this as I continue my work.