Cool, so, hi everybody.
Um, this is, it's pretty packed,
I'm very excited,
It's gonna be a pretty quick talk,
so if some of you have to stand, or like, squat weirdly
on the floor or something, i apologize,
but it won't last too long.
I feel like I'm just gonna jump right into it.
This is my first time speaking at a conference like this,
so it's gonna be an exciting time.
[APPLAUSE]
Cool, awesome. So this talk is about
how to fix everything, and not die trying,
but maybe that's not the best way to put that,
because of the priorities it sort of implies, you know, it's like 'how to fix everything, and then you might die, but let's try not to?'
so really this talk is about
how to not die
while trying to fix everything.
And I mean, like, fixing your own life,
but I also mean fixing the rest of the world, because
I don't know, if you're anything like me, it feels like that's somehow part of your job description.
And I mean, you're here at a culture talk at NZGDC, so you're probably the same.
Um, so real quick, who am I,
I'm Zelle Marcovicci,
you don't have to learn how to spell that one,
I'm a tutor, developer, anarchist, nerd,
and you can find me on Twitter at "tenderhooves"
but this is gonna be on the last slide as well, so you'll have time to, like, type it in.
or photograph it, I don't know, I don't have a QR code or anything,
but we're all very imaginative here so it's okay.
That's a photo of me at my wedding last year.
It's the best photo of myself I've got.
My wife's here in the front row,
and is awesome and very supoportive.
Um, so, hi.
Cool, so, I go on tangents a little bit, as you might imagine, but you'll only have me for 15 minutes, so I'm gonna be talking pretty fast.
But also, you know, this talk is being recorded, it'll end up online later, it's kind of important to me that this talk is open source.
I just want everybody to be able to look at it eventually.
So, first off, we're gonna have a little bit of a prologue,
because I think it's kind of cool and important that I let you all know
I don't know, I'm coming into this sort of games world from a weird place
and I kind of didn't think I would end up here.
Especially not giving a talk at NZGDC.
So, it's very exciting.
Cool. So.
As you can see, I was born as some kind of cartoon monkey
in San Francisco, California in 1993.
That's me.
I had a challenging childhood, so I was a pretty challenging kid.
This talk is going to get super personal, so I apologize for that, but, like, not enough to leave it out of the talk.
Okay, so by the time I was 14, my mental health was super bad,
I actually left high school permanently.
This is a photo of my dad's amazing house in San Francisco.
Which I saw a lot of, because I was so agoraphobic I didn't go outsides. [LAUGHS]
So, when I became an adult, I was told I was actually so profoundly unwell
that I would never live independently.
I was told I was too disabled for a group home.
And, uh, I would never be able to work.
So I was actually approved for disability payments on my first try,
You know, you're not from America, so you don't know how crazy this is.
It's so vanishingly rare in the states that the free attorney who was helping me file was like, "Oh my God, I've never seen this happen before."
So basically I was super messed up
and I was NEVER going to get better, and it's just all downhill from here.
So, um, if my doctors see this slideshow they are gonna be SO embarrassed.
[FAINT LAUGHTER]
Cool. So, I fell in love,
I cleaned up my life a little bit, mostly because of the love.
Eventually I moved to New Zealand, in 2016.
I did a little bit of contract work, which we'll talk a bit more about later, and I finally decided, okay.
I am completely ready for university.
Nothing will hold me back now, I've got my equivalency diploma,
Dropping out doesn't matter. It's time. It's gonna go perfectly.
And then a week into university, I got diagnosed with cancer.
But don't worry! Everything is fine! Because I'm in remission now! [LAUGHS]
Okay, so there is a point to all this, I promise, because in this talk I'm going to be giving you six simple instructions to fix everything.
Surely if you just follow these six simple steps, everything will be fixed.
We'll see how that goes.
So here's How To Fix Everything #1:
You will never be ready!
You can't perfectly prepare yourself, so just start now.
As I give this talk, I've almost graduated, I'm teaching several classes, I'm working on a couple of interesting projects we'll get into a little...
And my preparation didn't help at all, because every step of the journey has been unexpected, new, frightening, exciting, wonderful...
So let's talk projects real quick, when we're talking about our journeys as creatives we necessarily start
talking a LOT about projects we've worked on.
But the things we worked hardest on aren't always the things we're most proud of.
As an example, I made this tiny javascript project in one week that I called "Finch Game."
And it's a genetic simulator, these birds are differently suited to flinging themselves at that branch,
and they can pass on their traits if they make it there, and otherwise they super don't.
It was just a fun little project that never went anywhere,
but when I go back and think about Finch Game, and I do it ALL THE TIME,
because when I made it, one of my friends who's a schoolteacher in the states
was like "oh my God, can I show this to my kids to explain Darwin's finches and what we know about evolution?"
And I was like "Yeah! Obviously!" and then, like, the kids loved it.
And because I have this problem where I want to fix everything, which means everyone needs to understand animals and how great they are,
that makes it, like, a hundred times more valuable than anything else I've done.
I do have some other projects I've worked on. Funnily enough, they're really, like,
a couple of them are values-driven games about birds now? This is now a thing that I do, I don't know, it was an accident.
But one of the other best projects I've worked on was these two python games for iPad,
that was a whole thing, and they were developed for a vet centre that has a really mouthful name, but I'm gonna try and just say it all in one go,
Central Energy Trust Wildbase Recovery Centre,
that's up in Palmerston North, you can play these games on iPad.
I got to code a couple of games about the Department of Conservation, and what it's like being a wildlife vet.
They're educational, they're cute, they're simple, they're fun,
and you CAN still play them,
and what made them so exciting for me was that not only could I see really clear ethical values, but,
I got to design a lot of the actual mechanics, because I was sometimes the most technical person in the room.
Here's this kind of "investigating a crime scene" thing if your kiwi is eaten by a ferret,
And then here's, like, I made some touch controls where you swipe to draw blood into a syringe, I was really excited about this.
I was the only coder involved, it was a weird little project, but it meant that I had a huge amount of freedom.
While we're talking about being on tiny teams, I have to sort of take a moment to shout out game jams.
Anyone can participate in them, you get to take this single idea as far as possible,
in a really short time. I know everybody says you should do game jams, but I'm gonna say it too.
You get comfortable with the whole process of developing a game,
you invest so little time, and you get this very satisfying instant feedback loop because the process is so quick.
This is "Flat White Mage", it's a game where you shoot coffee and milk out of your hands.
And this is "Maitre D'ranged," it's about trying to cook a recipe but you have none of the actual ingredients they want,
so you just sort of approximate flavours and you hope it turns out okay,
and this is kind of how I feel standing up here and giving a talk to everyone, actually. [LAUGHS]
But I think these are perfect examples of weird little projects that give you a huge amount of control.
You can experiment with what's fun, and what's valuable, in this space where your failures don't matter.
So that brings me to How To Fix Everything #2.
Weird little projects might be where you thrive.
The amount of experimentation you get to do in these roles on small, strange teams or even as a solo developer
is unlike anything else. It's not always where you make much money, but you need something to get you up in the morning.
So what actually gets you up in the morning, and how do you figure out how to incorporate that into your work?
I've shown you a couple of projects that have what I always think of as direct value, it's really easy to see how they might be used to educate people on something, or the message is really clearly expressed in the work.
You can actually kind of follow my thought process, like
animals are great,
i'd like more people to respect animals,
so I made some games about caring for animals. Many sorts of educational games are going to have kind of this flow chart,
where there's this particular message that you're trying to express, and then you have to figure out how to do that within the bounds of the game.
Except there's all sorts of work you might be doing that's valuable, and that doesn't fit into this framework.
There's uncountable ways to create games that have a positive impact and I don't even know how to refer to it,
so I absolutely don't have the ability to cover it all.
But one really cool example of how you might take your values into making games is the studio Motion Twin.
If you haven't heard of Motion Twin you might have heard of their most successful game, which is Dead Cells.
It's a really wonderful game, it does express a lot of interesting values throughout the narrative
but that's not what brings me to Motion Twin at all. Motion Twin is a worker co-op.
The way they describe it is there's no boss, every worker is equal, and they all take home the exact same salary,
as well as having an equal say in decisionmaking.
They've been able to stick with this really strong expression of their values by keeping their core team extremely small rather than pushing for this endless growth.
This is a value that they express through their practice, not necessarily the messaging of the game.
That idea that they've found a value that is more important to them than endless growth is a really cool concept,
but they probably didn't fall into running a radical co-op, there were endless discussions that got them there.
Their flow chart was probably a lot more complicated than mine, and that might be more like what yours look like.
You know, when you set out to make something that's really values driven.
To start exploring what is most important to you, you can consider
using tools like "value decks", "ACT values", "value sorting exercises," you might not have heard of these
and there's about a billion different flavours,
but there's lots of free versions online, so if you've never seen one of these before
search something like this on DuckDuckGo, I mean, or Google, if that's your thing.
Usually they'll take the form of these sets of cards,
you sort them into priority lists and you compare them to each other, with the goal of figuring out which core values are most important to you.
And then you get to ask yourself, "are my actions actually aligning with those values?" which is the hard part.
because you can think all the nice thoughts in the world, but you have to actually incorporate it into your practice, too.
I think this is so massively important to figuring out who you are and what you want to do that it's How To Fix Everything #3:
Find your values.
Once you know them, you know what you're working towards, and nothing else will matter.
But while we're on the topic of projects, and what matters, in this industry we're kind of always talking about burnout, and I don't want to spend too much time on it, but we have to take a quick second.
I actually don't even like calling it burnout, because I feel like the way we use that word is... very soft. So let's call it what it is.
This is overwork,
followed by crushing stress,
and nervous breakdowns.
So this can destroy absolutely anyone, but if you're like me and you've kind of played mental illness bingo it'll put you in hospital if you're not careful.
And we talk about nervous breakdowns like they just happen up in the brain, and not in the body,
so if you're like me, you try to work straight through them, and and you're like
"Okay, well, everything's going haywire up here, but, you know, I can just kind of go through life, and it'll all be fine..."
But your brain and your body aren't actually meaningfully separate things, and overwork harms, like, the whole thing.
From your muscles, to your heart, to your ability to sleep.
So, okay, I am here to tell you there's ONE treatment I've found helpful.
And, in fact, it is How To Fix Everything #4:
STOP GIVING 110%.
SERIOUSLY! In fact,
Give like 60%.
A project will never get 110% out of me again.
By strategically doing less work than I feel like I "need" to, I give myself time to breathe, eat, sleep, and unwind.
This isn't easy, especially when you're working towards your values, and you want to fix everything.
People might keep telling you that you need to give everything you've got, and then some more, in order to fulfill your dreams, but they're totally wrong.
My dream was to make games, and that is still an attainable dream.
But you may have noticed the games industry is not easy for people who will die if we work constantly, which is everybody!
But there are alternatives. You just kind of have to find them.
You might end up working in a different industry entirely,
but having time for development on the side, because it's more forgiving.
A lot of people will tell you that your work has to be something you love, but the fact is sometimes the work you love has ridiculous expectations.
There's no shame in having the work you can tolerate and that gives you enough free time to do your own thing. And, you know, we're complex human beings, so
sometimes you love multiple fields, and you pick the one that's kindest to you and that's awesome.
If you're making games for a living,
maybe you can work for a games studio with good priorities. They are out there, there's a couple of them here at NZGDC.
More and more studios are beginning to see the value in not destroying their team members, and we can only hope it continues.
Just last night -- this is a rapidly updating set of slides --
I heard that both Balancing Monkey Games and Artifact 5, who are both represented here
have switched to a four-day work week, which ties in really nicely with that idea of giving 60%.
And if you're lucky, you can even string together those weird little projects I mentioned
My wife was a freelancer for years, and the worst part is doing your own taxes.
It's even worse if you're me, because you're an American citizen, and then you have to pay taxes twice, even on New Zealand income. But!
If you're active in the industry, and you're willing to put yourself out there,
it's really possible to queue up work, like, six months in advance, and just ride it for as long as possible.
I stumbled into a weird but thrilling job recently, which is teaching.
Thanks to the relationships I've developed at Massey University, I've been able to get my foot in that door
and give lectures and run workshops while I finish up my degree, which is slightly too many things,
but it still takes MUCH less of my time than coding for projects did
and that leaves me room to work on weird stuff!
But more importantly to me, it actually puts me in contact with young developers and designers,
and then we get to learn to make weird stuff together! It's awesome!
Another really exciting thing I've been doing...
I've gotten to do it through Massey, is working with the Processing Foundation,
which is basically all about trying to make visual artists and coders into the same people.
They've given me some funding as part of the Google Summer of Code
and I'm writing documentation to try to get beginners into making art and small games with Python.
So this is really important to me. It's about empowering people to understand development and participate in it so it's energized me, more than...
pretty much anything else I've ever done.
Which of course is because it's really in line with my values, so even when I'm doing lots of tiny things I feel fulfilled and like I'm making a difference.
Which brings me to How to Fix Everything #5:
Connection is better than Production.
In my case, I would rather have a network of peers, mentors and students than a mile-long portfolio, and it actually gets me just as many opportunities.
And this isn't just about connecting to people, if your job's not mega social,
it's about connecting to your work and finding ways to do work that is meaningful to you,
whether that's your job or something you do on the side.
This is easy to understand but hard to internalize.
I always think, if I can afford to take the weird little jobs that energise me and that help me help other people, I've never regretted doing them.
The point I'm trying to make here is that there IS room in the industry for me and you and people like us, even if we have to make it happen.
And even larger than that, there is room for people like us in the world outside the industry - as learners, teachers, creatives, friends, lovers and fixers of everything.
Sometimes we have to talk twice as loud and twice as eloquently as the next guy to get noticed,
and sometimes someone has to take a gamble on us to let us in.
Once we're in these spaces, we can try to fix them and throw open the door for those who have not yet made it in, and whose voices are enormously valuable.
There is one more tip.
How To Fix Everything #6:
None of us can fix everything alone.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]