My One-Year Inspiration

At orientation a little less than a week ago, the newest student intake was herded into an auditorium in the Scotiabank theatre in downtown Vancouver to hear about our coming lives. The presenters told us that this year will be transformative, and that we will be amazed with our skills and the quality of our work by the end. There was a great deal of inspirational messaging, and being a natural romantic and a dreamer (and wanting it all to be true), I ate it up and asked for more.

Even while awash in the good-time-feelings I haven't forgotten that the real world is a tough place, and things seldom just work out. It is almost never that you wanted it so badly that things fell into place; it is that you wanted it badly enough to ask the right questions, do the right research, and work hard enough to make it happen for you. We should all learn to take more credit for our victories and defeats.

Still, I've been working and living long enough to know that a truly positive attitude—from the moment you wake up to the moment your day goes entirely to shit—is incredibly valuable. It keeps you sharp and able to roll with that RL grit. Best of all, it's infectious, and energized, challenged people tend to be surrounded by same.

My point? I wanted to share with you my one-year inspiration—the future event I am holding in my mind to push/pull me through the late nights and frustrations; the missed trains and setbacks and arguments.

The Game Design program at VFS has an industry night for each intake where the student groups present their final projects (playable games) to videogame industry recruiters and other important industry talent. As you can imagine, having an audience like this is exceedingly rare—it may never happen to any of us ever again—and I won't be the only one there that evening hoping that my specific combination of personality and the hard work from my whole team will garner some interest from movers-and-shakers.

So, here is my one-year inspiration.

A year from now I am about to present my game at game industry night. The other presentations so far have been great, but then I knew they would be since all teams worked pretty closely together this year. Our demo is ready and the tech seems stable. My team and I exchange some nods and nervous smiles, and then I step on to the stage. The lights are bright and too warm—I'll hate that—but I'm confident in our project and the work we have done. "Thank you for coming tonight," I'll say as the screen lights up behind me, "I want to share something with you that I am extremely proud of. This. Is."

And then I'll name our project. That's it. It will be nerve-wracking to get there, and there are no guarantees that I will be taking the lead on the industry night presentation (it looks like project management is a skill fostered in all Game Design grads). Still, that twenty-second snippet from those 20 minutes one August night about a year from now will be my goal for the foreseeable future.

It may sound cornball, but being inspired is a big deal. Regardless of your passion, what's your inspiration for being excellent in it? Let me know with a comment.