Week 1.12: What is my WHY?

Before trying to articulate my longer term goals I wanted follow Simon Sinek’s lead to reflect on the ‘why’ — Why do I want to run a game development studio?

Without doubt, some of the most rewarding software I’ve written isn’t the groundbreaking development of 3G base stations. It isn’t the software I wrote that handled all the telemetry for the Orion spacecraft during launch and and subsequent transit into geostationary orbit. And it isn’t the adaptive multi-rate codec system I wrote for a mobile phone. All of these were prestigeous in their own, unique way but they weren’t really rewarding. No, the most rewarding software I’ve developed I wrote before my professional career began. I wrote a set of text-based adventure games when I was at school that my friends loved to play. It was as much fun seeing them play my games as it was writing them. Back then, I wrote fun sofware. It was software that entertained my friends and, when they completed the game, it was software that (hopefully) made them feel good as well.

My whole professional career has been devoted to writing ‘sensible’ and ‘serious’ software. Reading that back now, makes me feel like Mr. Brown from the first Paddington film: “and [Jonathan] is now only allowed to play with safe, educational, indoor toys from the olden days.”

There has to be more to life than that!

I want a change. I want to write fun software. I want to write software that entertains. I want to write software that brings people joy, and laughter, and creates a sense of achievement. I want to write software that makes people happy.

That’s why I signed up to the IGD course.

That’s why I want to start a game studio.

That’s why I want to develop games.

References

Photo by Emily Morter on Unsplash