A Career: GameDay Peru talk

Long-time blog readers know that I spent a large chunk of my childhood in Peru. It was there, in fact, that I first started to make games. I lived in Lima, in San Isidro, a relatively well-off neighborhood. It was the height of the Shining Path terrorism period: gringo things were blown up with great regularity. The KFC. The Pizza Hut. The local arcade.

The art institute Instituto Toulouse Lautrec is launching the first ever game design program in Peru this year. There are programs for 3d modelers, animators, and programmers there and elsewhere already. There’s a small but thriving work-for-hire community that also does original game development. The time seemed right. When they asked me to come give a talk, it was an emotional moment — and the first time in almost thirty years that I had set foot in Lima.

I scheduled time with friends and relatives. Before I left, my mom pointed out, just as she did before I got the Online Legend Award, that it’s important to let people know that Latinos can manage a career in the industry. People don’t think of me as Latino, and honestly, I don’t tend to think of myself that way, most of the time.

It was a long flight over — San Diego to Atlanta, from there to Lima. I arrived at a bit past midnight. When the driver in the hotel shuttle heard that I used to live there, he took me the long way around, to show me the way that things had changed. It was dark, but even in the middle of the night I could see the way development and careful in-filling had allowed the addition of a new a highway on the coastal cliff from Callao to Miraflores. I fell asleep around 2:30am. Little did I know it would be the earliest bedtime I’d have during my stay.

It all began at 9am the next day. Breakfast with my oldest friend. Right after I was collected for a round of interviews and time to go over the proposed courses and syllabi for the game design program. I suggested a bit more on statistics, and wondered aloud about the amount of general traditional liberal arts education that could be offered within the context of the program. It’s a vocational school, in a sense, but I strongly believe that traditional literature, arts, history, and humanities are vitally important for a game designer.

Then an IGDA party. I had brought with me all the of the boardgame prototypes I have been making. We didn’t get to try the newest one, but all the others were played quite a lot. I basically took over the IGDA party with playtests. Then off for dinner — at 1am.

I had been asked to run a workshop for the instructors there at the Institute the next day. It was 4 1/2 hours straight of pacing and talking. We went over industry trends, team structures, that sort of thing — then a good solid 3 hours on what I am currently calling my “map of game.” It’s a diagram that encompasses all the fields, subjects, ways of looking at games, mapped onto the classic interaction loop. Reference books and cited articles, resources and ideas for further investigation — all in a giant infodump. It kind of underlined for me just how far we have come, and how much there is out there now, in terms of game studies.

Then another interview… This meant we didn’t even tackle lunch until almost 3pm.

Then I had to go write my talk. At this point, it was all a stew in my head, and I decided to go with an autobiographical angle, because I had by then retold the story of how I grew up there dozens of times. I had thought about doing the Map of Game thing as the talk, but instead, all of these swirling emotions and thoughts came together in my head and I decided to just do a pure inspirational talk.

Here were all these enthusiastic kids, passionate about their fighting games or their Marios, wondering whether such a thing as a videogame career was even possible in a place like Peru. Here they were, wondering whether there could be a job for them after they finished, wondering whether the country itself would have developed enough around them to make it possible.

Wondering, as Latin Americans often do, whether they are good enough, as they look around the history around them and think about the incredible resources the countries typically have, and the all-too-common wreck of things that have been made, via the legacies of colonialism and the modern imperialism of market forces. People there just all too often think they’re just not good enough, or else surely by now the country would have gotten on its feet? All too often when progress arrives, it’s in the form of malls full of American and European brands, never anything local. Often, the history of South American countries makes them intensely proud of their culture, and totally unsupportive of it in any financial sense.

So here’s the talk, slides only, in Spanish as I delivered it and in English. I just desperately wanted to tell them that yes, it can be done because all you need is a pencil and paper to get started. Yes it can be done because what you really need aren’t game design programs but the passion to make yourself a lifelong learner. That yes, games matter despite what a culture might tell you about how they are for the lazy and the childish. That it’s about putting one foot in front of the other.

We never stop wondering whether we’re good enough. I stayed up until 4am another night, talking with Gonzalo Ordóñez, the Chilean artist known as Genzoman. We swapped stories of professional disappointments and how much of our work had never made it out into the world. The kids needed to know that this, too, is what success looks like.

The pun that serves as the title isn’t easily translatable, alas. In Spanish, “carrera” is a career, a course of study (like a major, or a degree), and it also means a race, like a footrace. I moved freely across these three meanings as I spoke. You can read the slides here. I think it was recorded, so at some point perhaps there will be a transcript.

In the end, the best I can hope is that for some of these kids, it pointed a way forward.