The old Legend of the Five Rings tabletop RPG made great use of flavor text. One of the ones I remember was a sidebar in the basic book filled with sayings of Shinsei, the teacher who brought religion to the Emerald Empire. The religion was a pastiche of Shinto, Zen Buddhism, Taoism and even had a story about reincarnation from Hinduism — the writers grabbed anything a gamemaster could lean on to get the vibe of an Eastern fantasy warrior culture. Some of it was probably cribbed from Western aphorisms, too, but dangit, GMs wanting to roleplay wise old sages could do a lot worse.
One saying was, “The hunter who chases two rabbits will lose both.” This always struck me as pretty good advice. If you’re going after something complicated, or have limited time, often the problem is having split your focus. Unfortunately, right now I don’t have much of a choice, because…
Oh, By the Way, My Industry Collapsed
The video gaming industry is not in a good place. Over the past three years or so, countless studios have been closed, and many others have chosen to lay off staff. It’s not so much a “We can replace the writers with AI!” kind of scenario, because they can’t, really. But they sure can say, “We can close down this entire game studio and focus on AI instead because that’s what makes the stock price go up!”
Narrative jobs in particular have an unemployment rate around 22-25%, which is about what the Great Depression had (24.9%) at its height in 1933. Many of the remaining jobs are not remote, or they’re based many time zones away in Europe, or other considerations that rule me out.
Surprising no one, I’ve been taking a mixture of freelance gigs with indie studios and yes, jobs outside the games industry. The indie games have yet to ship. Hedging my bets, I’ve been retraining myself by taking night classes in the field of cybersecurity. As of last week, I graduated a 9-month program affiliated with San Diego State University.
Would I take a job in the gaming industry if I spotted a good fit? Absolutely. Would I take a job in tech to learn new skills and deliver on what I know? Also yes. I found out during my exams that while I’m not as l33t as the students with actual CS degrees, I can explain concepts and write detailed reports for clients, so my skills actually complement one another reasonably well.
So… What’s the Take-Away?
If you’re a fan, you may be asking, “What does this mean for Chris’s writerly schedule?” It’s not a very big change, unless you were hoping for a shipped video game from me very soon. I’ve been writing short stories and the novel sequel on evenings and weekends for much of the past year anyway. I have recently signed a contract for another short story, but when and where it will be published has yet to be announced.
If you’re in the cybersecurity field looking at this website and asking “What is all this?” — well, consider it my secret origin story. I got sick of scammers trying to phish me with fake movie deals or trying to brute-force my website’s password. I took matters into my own hands, and now I have a better understanding of network configuration, hacking, incident response, digital forensics, and a whole lot of other cybersecurity concepts.
As for the rabbit problem… we’ll see if the split focus is harmful or helpful. Sometimes the most successful people are ones that can marry concepts from two separate disciplines.
One of the other L5R sayings was, “When you eat, just eat. When you read, just read. When you eat and read, just eat and read.”