About a year ago I put up an article concerning my new job and a revitalized belief that I could make video games. I’m sure most of you have noticed I have presented nothing since then, and I’ve updated less frequently. This isn’t because I’ve been hiding away tinkering with things during my free time instead of writing or gaming.

That job I had last year was horrible. When they bothered to give me work, it was debugging or skeleton code. I watched as co-workers had to work sixty hour weeks while I was put to the sidelines with nothing to do. I remember stressing out over bugs, trying to figure out why things weren’t working only for the back-end developers to roll out another update and, oh look, everything broke again. When I was finally given front-end web work to do, I was only given enough to last me a couple of days. There was one day I was put in charge of a “project” with not enough time to get it done, an incomplete list of requirements and impossible expectations. I worked twelve hours one day, and at the end of it I found myself fixing code I had no memory of even writing even though I had written it five minutes ago.

But as I said, my other co-workers had it much worse. My problem was that the job was boring most of the time. When it wasn’t boring, however, it was stressful.

I had a small, tiny, itty bitty taste of what the games industry is like. As I watched the stress in the faces of my co-workers, saw them at their desks working more hours than I had, heard their lack of progress made despite spending an entire Saturday there, my mind kept flashing back to the dozens of articles I’ve read over the past few years of horrible working conditions.

That is neither a job nor a career. That is how other countries demoralize the populace so it is easier to just roll in with tanks and subjugate them.

Fortunately, I was laid off from that job. It was one of the happiest days of my life, though I dreaded what my next job might be like. In a word, my current job is awesome. The commute is longer, but it is a lot more entertaining and fulfilling. No one is dead in the eyes here. No one is selling their soul for this place. It’s amazing and I love it.

I have learned something about myself, though. In a lot of ways, I could be a programmer. I could learn to develop games from the ground up. It can be mildly enjoyable and I could be decent at it. It is not something that I want to do, though. Not anymore, at least.

Over the past couple of years I’ve learned that you can never really work towards a dream job. Not in the traditional sense, at least. If you take classes and practice you can get a number of office jobs or blue collar work. Yet my dream jobs of game design, writing and comics require several extra elements in order to succeed. Passion, talent and luck. I have not given enough of myself to have passion for any of those things.

So I shall make a New Year’s Resolution (even though it is almost a month late). I shall learn to write for fun again. I’ve already been practicing, though not with game reviews. I’ve been practicing my story-telling and prose. I doubt I’ll be sharing any of that with my audience here any time soon. It is challenging, but it is also fulfilling. This comes before my other passions. Second would be GameLandEtc.. I would love to update that regularly again.

I need to learn to do these things for passion, first. I believe the talent is there, but it will only be squandered if I do nothing with it.

What does this mean for GamerTagged.net? I don’t know. I want to keep writing about games, but that is harder lately than ever. It’s hard to think of the words, or to, once again, feel the passion in my heart. I’ve told people before that when I get depressed, I play games less than when I’m feeling good about life.

Well, things haven’t quite been going my way lately, and I need to become fine with that. It’s hard, but it needs to be done. I’m at least one step in that direction with a good job.

I hope to provide more updates in this space over the next year, but I can promise nothing. If anything awesome happens, I’ll post about it here.

Now let’s see if I’m talking out of my ass again.