There's Still So Much To Learn
“Much to learn you still have, my old padawan, this is only the beginning.” -Yoda, As played by Frank Oz, Star Wars: Episode II
A couple of days ago I returned home from my yearly trek to the Gencon gaming convention in Indianapolis, Indiana. This was my 16th time attending the convention in a row. If you aren’t big into gaming, you may have never heard of it, but Gencon is the biggest game convention in the United States and it’s been happening annually for over 50 years now. When I started attending, it was something that I did for fun. It was a chance to see new games and meet new friends who had similar interests.
For the last seven years now, I have been attending Gencon as a game designer. And while I still have lots of fun and get a chance to see new games and make new friends… It’s become one of the single most important business events for me each year.
When I first began attending as a designer, it started to flip the script on how I saw everything happening at the convention. For one thing, I no longer could just wander around willy nilly, not worrying about my schedule and checking things out in a lackadaisical fashion. Instead, I felt like I needed to be working the whole time, trying to find leads for publishers that I could pitch to while I was there.
I found that to be stressful. Over the years, I learned that the best way to get a pitch meeting with a publisher was actually to set it up well before the convention even started. That didn’t relieve stress, it instead just shifted it back to the weeks and months before the convention.
In the last few years, I asked for advice from several of my designer friends and am happy to report that I actually have gotten pretty good at booking meetings before Gencon. This has also applied to other conventions as well. That meant that several times at conventions, I would sit down with a publisher and show them my one or two games that I thought might fit in their product line. Some of those meetings would turn into further discussions and sometimes publishing deals, which accounts for my 5 published or soon to be published games.
Fast forward to 2019. This year I have started spending more time designing games with other people. Not only does it help me be more productive but it also helps me struggle less with feelings of doubt about my work being not good enough.
One of the designers that I am working with is quite a bit more experienced than me and also has several more games published than I do. For this Gencon, he offered for me to join him in several of his pitch meetings. I agreed as we would be pitching a game that we co-designed. But there was a secondary reason that I accepted the invitation— I wanted to see how he pitched, I wanted to learn from him. I figured that I would be able to pick up a few tips and tricks on the best practices of pitching to publishers.
As it turns out, I learned more than I would have ever expected. It seems that there was a whole lot that I didn’t know that I didn’t know. And now that I have learned all this new information, it makes me want even more. I think for a long time I felt like with game design that I knew enough and really just needed to focus on practicing the art of it and I would find myself getting better at all the aspects of game design. But practice doesn’t fill in all the gaps. Practice doesn’t prepare me to understand how everything works.
I could practice using a hammer for my entire life. I could be the best hammerer in the world and at the end of the day, if I was trying to drive a screw into a board using a hammer, I’d still have less than satisfactory results. However, if someone showed me how to use a drill, I’d be much more successful.
It’s important that we never forget that there is still so much to learn in life. I’ve been in the game industry for almost a decade. I worked in the mortgage industry for almost two decades and in both those areas there are still absolutely countless things for me to learn.
I have to believe that in your life, whether or not you see it, you are likely in the same boat.
So get out there and be willing to learn. Look to those people around you who can teach you. And when you do that, don’t just look for people with more experience than you. Instead, look for people with different experiences and perspectives than you. That’s where you can truly find new and unique perspectives that can really change the way that you think.
-Jason