If anything, I am probably an ideator… [1]
…which is really just a kind way of admitting that I rarely complete anything I set out to accomplish.
You see it in this orphaned blog, just as you would see it in the reams of sketches, references and notes which litter every surface of my bedroom.
It isn’t necessarily because I’m prone to giving up, but rather because I tend to pick up other bits-and-pieces of ideas as I go along and eventually shift my focus to another project until that one, too, is abandoned. It’s a gentle, tepid sort of abortion which leaves titillating morsels scattered about my life like fallen autumn leaves – so that I occasionally find a scrap of paper, squeezed between two novels on my bookshelf, and smile nostalgically before filing it away, never to be seen again.
I have yet to figure out any kind of solution to this (I gather, rather common) affliction, but nowhere does it bother me more than in the fugues of lucidity during which I realise that my career is merely a hopper for my cash machine. I pour precious hours of my life in at the top, and crisp banknotes slide out of the slot.
As a general rule, in those melancholy moments, I plan my future.
Amid a flurry of possible tomorrows ranging from Ecotechnology to Storywriter (with more tangents than I could bear to mention), one of the ideas that I inevitably return to is that of reinventing myself as a Game Designer – I can’t remember any time in my life when I was not fascinated by games of all kinds, and so many of my arrested concepts seem to relate be storylines and concept art and game mechanics…
…it has also come to my attention that this theoretical game-designing Renaud is the only one for whom I have made any material steps (having acquired a number of quaint and curious volumes on mathematics, programming and game design), and so it seems that Renaud might be more concrete.
…and now it is.
As of last week, I began the process of reinventing myself as a Game Designer.
I would love to take credit for this (I really would) but, as with all great things that happen in life, this has happened largely out of my control. In applying for the course, I flicked a domino which began a cascade of events, neatly sliced into bite-sized chunks that I could operate. Little moments, which could be handled with a momentary “well, I could do this.” With the sole exception of my family’s monumental support.
So there you have it, I am now a Vancouverite… a Vancouverian… Vancouverese. I have exchanged Contract Negotiation for Game Design.
Watch this space.
[1] ideate [ˈaɪdɪˌeɪt] vb (tr) to form or have an idea of; to imagine or conceive.
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003
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