Why Design?

            Game design was not something that I envisioned myself doing.  Obviously I love playing games and have since my pre-teenage years, but making games for a living was never something I thought very long about.  Since my time in the military I have grown up a lot and I tend to judge decisions with a healthy dose of pessimism along side my enthusiasm.  The military left me with many skills, a lot of them not needed in the civilian world.  Yes, one may think (and the recruiter and army adds will say) that the leadership and teamwork skills, along with the discipline will be invaluable to civilian employers.  Let’s face it though, there are many people with these skills and while they help a lot, there is no need for combat skills in the civilian workforce.  That being said, most of the options I foresaw for myself were law enforcement and similar professions.  This, I know I did not want to do so college was the only route.

            A year after I left active duty I found myself working with a friend in Alaska.  Long story short he was in the same position I was: out of the Army, sour about his experience and no clue what to do with his life.  He is the person that told me about Full Sail and this program.  After researching to get somewhat of an idea what a game designer does it clicked for me, so to speak.  I couldn’t decide on what to get a degree in, in a traditional sense, because of the wide arrange of interests I have.  I have always had a wide range of things I studied as a hobby since I was young such as history, science, economics and computers/tech (to name a few).  Knowing that, being armed with an inquisitive nature, and a love for learning, I knew that I could take my hobby/borderline obsession of playing video games and turn it into something more.

            I didn’t jump on this train with the mindset of, “zOmg I love playing World of Warcraft so I want to work at Blizzard!”  While that would be nice (maybe not, considering the nature of the beast), those dreams are not just going to fall from the sky because I dropped sixty grand on college tuition.  Looking at all the challenges and risk this industry has to offer I sometimes think it is too much of an endeavor.  This, in turn, makes me want to learn more and that is what drives me to be a designer.  Nowhere else that I have looked can I take all of my passions and use them to create.  Nowhere else have I found things to be so dynamic and chaotic that my sick sense of adventure can be sated.  The ride is the best part, and right now I feel like I’m in line waiting to get on the fastest and craziest roller coaster ever.

I originally posted this on my class discussion board and at my blog on Full Sail's Game Design Community at http://fs-gamedesign.ning.com/profiles/blogs/why-design.